When I was very new as a street-corner preacher for the Catholic Evidence Guild, a questioner asked me what I meant by spirit. I answered, “A spirit has no shape, has no size, has no color, has no weight, does not occupy space.” He said, “That’s the best definition of nothing I ever heard,” which was very reasonable of him. I had given him a list of things spirit is not, without a hint of what it is.
In theology, spirit is not only a key word, it is the key word. Our Lord said to the Samaritan woman, “God is a spirit.” Unless we know the meaning of the word spirit, we do not know what he said. It is as though he had said “God is a –,” which tells us nothing at all. The same is true of every doctrine; they all include spirit. In theology we are studying spirit all the time. And the mind with which we are studying it is a spirit too. We simply must know what it is. And I don’t mean just a definition. We must live with the idea, make it our own, learn to handle it comfortably and skillfully. Slow careful thinking here will pay dividends later. This is not planned as a hard-gallop over the fields of revelation. It is an effort to teach the beginnings of theology.
We begin with our own spirit, the one we know best. Spirit is the element in us by which we know and love, by which therefore we decide. Our body knows nothing; it loves nothing (bodily pleasures are not enjoyed by the body; it reacts to them physically, with heightened pulse, for instance, or acid stomach; but it is the knowing mind that enjoys the reactions or dislikes them); the body decides nothing (though our will may decide in favor of things that give us bodily pleasure).
Spirit knows and loves. A slightly longer look at ourselves reveals that spirit has power too. It is the mind of man that splits the atom; the atom cannot split the mind-it cannot even split itself, since it does not know about its own electrons.
Mind, we say, splits the atom and calculates the light years. It is true that in both these operations it uses the body. But observe that there is no question which is the user and which is the used. The mind uses the body, not asking the body’s consent. The mind is the principal, the body the instrument. Is the instrument essential? Must the mind use it to cope with matter? We have evidence in our own experience of mind affecting matter directly. We will to raise our arm, for example, and we raise it. The raising of the arm is a very complicated anatomical activity, but it is set in motion by a decision of the will. And as we shall see, the direct power the human mind has over its own body, mightier spirits have over all matter.
This mingling of spirit and matter in human actions arises from a fact that distinguishes man’s spirit from all others. Ours is the only spirit that is also a soul-that is to say, the life principle in a body. God is a spirit but has no body; the angels are spirits but have no bodies. Only in man spirit is united with a body, animates the body, and makes it to be a living body. Every living body-vegetable, lower animal, human-has a life-principle, a soul. And just as ours is the only spirit that is a soul, so ours is the only soul that is a spirit. Later we shall be discussing the union of spirit and matter in man to see what light it sheds upon ourselves. But for the present our interest is in spirit.
We have seen that in us spirit does a number of things; it knows and loves, and it animates a body. But what, at the end of all this, is spirit?
We can get at it by looking into our own soul, examining in particular one of the things it does. It produces ideas. I remember a dialogue one of our Catholic Evidence Guild speakers had with a materialist, who asserted that his idea of justice was the result of a purely bodily activity produced by man’s material brain.
Speaker: How many inches long is it?
Questioner: Don’t be silly, ideas have no length.
Speaker: O.K. How much does it weigh?
Questioner: What are you doing? Trying to make a fool of me?
Speaker: No. I’m taking you at your word. What color is it? What shape?
The discussion at this point broke down, the materialist saying the Catholic was talking nonsense. It is nonsense, of course, to speak of a thought having length or weight or color or shape. But the materialist had said that thought is material, and the speaker was simply asking what material attributes it had. In fact it has none, and the materialist knew this perfectly well. Only he had not drawn the obvious conclusion. If we are continuously producing things that have no attribute of matter, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is in us some element that is not matter to produce them. This element we call spirit.
Oddly enough, the materialist thinks of us as superstitious people who believe in a fantasy called spirit and thinks of himself as the plain, blunt man who asserts that ideas are produced by a bodily organ (the brain). What he is asserting is that matter produces offspring that have not one single attribute in common with it, and what could be more fantastic than that? We are the plain, blunt men and we should insist on it.
Occasionally a materialist will argue that there are changes in the brain when we think, grooves or electrical discharges or whatnot. But these only accompany the thought; they are not the thought. When we think of justice, for instance, we are not thinking of the grooves in the brain; most of us are not even aware of them. Justice has a meaning, and it does not mean grooves. When I say that mercy is kinder than justice, I am not comparing mercy’s grooves with the stricter grooves of justice.
Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space-and neither has spirit, whose offspring they are. But no one can call spirit nothing, for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world-apart from love, which spirit also produces.
We have now come to the hardest part of our examination of spirit. It will have much sweat and strain in it, for you, for me; but everything will be easier afterwards.
We begin with a statement that sounds negative, but isn’t: “A spirit differs from a material thing by having no parts.” Once we have made our own the meaning of this, we are close to our goal.
A part is any element in a being which is not the whole of it, as my chest is a part of my body or an electron a part of an atom. A spirit has no parts. There is no element in it that is not the whole of it. There is no division of parts as there is in matter. Our body has parts, each with its own specialized function; it uses its lungs to breathe with, its eyes to see with, its legs to walk with. Our soul has no parts, for it is spirit. There is no element in our soul that is not the whole soul. It does a remarkable variety of things-knowing, loving, animating a body-but each of them is done by the whole soul; it has no parts among which to divide them up.
This “partlessness” of spirit is the difficulty for the beginner. Concentrate on what follows: A being that has no parts does not occupy space. There is hardly anything that one can say to make this truth any clearer; you merely go on looking at it until suddenly you find yourself seeing it. The most any teacher can do is to offer a few observations. Think of anything that occupies space, and you see that it must have parts; there must be elements in it that are not the whole of it-this end is not that, the top is not the bottom, the inside is not the outside. If it occupies space at all, be it ever so microscopic, or so infinitesimally submicroscopic, there must be some “spread.” Space is simply what matter spreads its parts in. But a being with no parts at all has no spread. Space and it have nothing whatever in common; it is spaceless, which is to say it is superior to the need for space.
The trouble is that we find it hard to think of a thing existing if it is not in space, and we find it very hard to think of a thing acting if it has no parts. As against the first difficulty we must remind ourselves that space is merely emptiness, and emptiness can hardly be essential to existence. As against the second we must remind ourselves that parts are only divisions, and dividedness can hardly be an indispensable aid to action.
As against both we may be helped a little by thinking of one of our own commonest operations, the judgments we are make all the time. When in our mind we judge that in a given case mercy is more useful than justice, we hardly realize what a surprising thing we have done. We have taken three ideas or concepts-mercy, justice, and usefulness-and we have found some kind of identity between mercy and usefulness: Mercy is useful. This means that we must have got mercy and usefulness together in our mind. There can be no “distance” between the two concepts; if there were, they could not be got together for comparison and judgment. If the mind were spread out as the brain is, with the concept mercy in one part of the mind, and the concept usefulness in another, they would have to stay uncompared. The concepts justice and usefulness must be similarly together and some identity affirmed between them, the judgment made that justice is useful.
That is not all. All three concepts must be together, so that the superior usefulness of mercy can be affirmed. The power to make judgments is at the very root of man’s power to live and to develop in the mastery of himself and his environment. And the power to make judgments is dependent upon the partlessness of the soul-one single, undivided thinking principle to take hold of and hold in one all the concepts we wish to compare.
One further truth remains to be stated about spirit: It is the permanent thing, the abiding thing.
As we have seen, a steady gaze will show us that a being that has no parts, no element in it that is not the whole of it, cannot occupy space. Continue to gaze and we see that it cannot be changed into anything else; no natural process can destroy it. We have at last arrived at the deepest truth about spirit: Spirit is the being that has a permanent hold upon what it is, so that it can never become anything else.
Material beings can be destroyed in the sense that they can be broken up into their constituent parts; what has parts can be taken apart. But a partless being lies beyond this. Nothing can be taken from it, because there is nothing in it but its whole self. We can conceive, of course, of its whole self being taken out of existence. This would be annihilation. But just as only God can create from nothing by willing a being to exist, so only God can reduce a being to nothing by willing it no longer to exist; and for the human soul, God has told us that he will not thus will it out of existence.
A spiritual being, therefore, cannot lose its identity. It can experience changes in its relation to other beings-e.g., it can gain new knowledge or lose knowledge that it has; it can transfer its love from this object to that; it can develop its power over matter; its own body can cease to respond to its animating power and death follows for the body-but with all these changes it remains itself, conscious of itself, permanent.
The student to whom all this is new should keep on thinking over these truths, turning back to them at odd moments-on the way to work, for instance, or in periods of insomnia. He should keep on looking at the relation between having parts and occupying space till he sees, really sees, that a partless being cannot be in space. He should keep on looking at the relation between having parts and ceasing to exist, till he sees as clearly that a partless being cannot ever be anything but itself.
We should try to bring together, to see together, all these separate truths about spirit. One way is to concentrate upon our own soul, the spirit we know best-wholly itself, forever itself, doing each thing that it does with its whole self. Yet the human soul is the lowest of spirits. The least of the angels is unimaginably superior in power. The philosophers tell us that angels could, so powerful are they, destroy our material universe if the mightier power of God did not prevent them-as that same power will prevent man from destroying it until God wills that it should end.
It is not enough to have learned what spirit is. We must build the knowledge into the very structure of our minds. Seeing spiritual reality must become one of the mind’s habits. When it does, we have reached the first stage of maturity. Materialism, however persuasively argued, can no longer take hold on us. We may not always be able to answer the arguments, but it makes no difference. Materialism is repulsive; all our mental habits are set against it. It is as if a scientist was to produce arguments in favor of walking on all fours: We should find the idea repulsive; all our bodily habits would be set against us. That indeed is no bad comparison. The man who knows of the universe of spirit walks upright, while the materialist hugs the earth.
We have known all our lives that God is not an old man with a beard (looking rather like Karl Marx, especially when the artist wanted to show God angry, as he often did.) We have realized too that the more complex picture of an old man with a long beard, a young man with a short beard, and a dove bears no resemblance to the Blessed Trinity: It is merely the artist trying to do his best. But getting rid of the pictures is of value only if, in their place, we develop a truer idea of God; otherwise we have merely a blank where the pictures used to hang.
God is a spirit. As a first step towards forming our idea of him, we imagine our body away and see our soul existing and functioning bodiless: It is partless, spaceless, and immortal; it knows, loves, decides, acts. And all these things are true of God. But our soul is not God’s equal, it is only his image. God is infinite, we are not.
Note the meaning of the word infinite. It is from the Latin finis, meaning an end or boundary or limit. The prefix in- is negative; it means that there is no such thing in God as a finis. God is without limit or boundary or end. The word infinite is not in Scripture but had anyone suggested limitations in God’s knowledge or love or power the chosen people would have reacted with horror. Whatever perfection there is, God has it totally. Apply this notion of limit to our own soul; it knows certain things, but they are a mere drop in the ocean of things it doesn’t know. Its knowing is limited, and so are its loving and its power. There are none of these limits in God-he is all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful.
We shall return to these, but only after looking at the greatest difference of all-namely, that the soul owes its existence to God. He brought it into existence, holds it in existence, could reduce it to nothing again (but he has told us he will not). To have no hold of one’s own upon existence is the most limiting limitation of all, and marks the greatest difference between the finite spirit which is our soul and the infinite spirit which is God.
Bernard Shaw tells of asking a priest, “Who made God?” The priest, says Shaw, was thunderstruck, his faith shattered. Whether he committed suicide or merely left the Church Shaw does not tell. But the whole thing is ridiculous. Every student of philosophy has heard the question, and they all know that there must be a being that did not need to be made. If nothing existed except receivers of existence, where would the existence come from? In order that anything may exist, there must be a being that simply has it. God can confer existence upon all other beings, precisely because he has it in his own right. It is his nature to exist. God does not have to receive existence, because he is existence.
Now we understand the name God gave himself. The story is in the third chapter of Exodus. God had appeared to Moses in the burning bush. When Moses asked him his name, God said, “I am who am. Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: He who is hath sent me to you.” This is God’s name for himself: I AM. Our name for him is HE IS. (The Hebrew word for this is Yahweh. The Jews, out of reverence, avoided writing God’s name in full; they wrote the consonants only, JHWH. Somebody in the thirteenth century made a bad guess at the missing vowels and produced the word Jehovah. Actually there is no such word.)
That is the primary truth about God. He is, he exists, with all that existence in its fullness can mean. We shall look deeper into that.
“Where was God before the universe was created?” asks the street-corner heckler. His question breaks up nicely into two parts-Where was God when there wasn’t any where? Where was God when there wasn’t any when? Briefly, the answer is that the words where and when have no application to God at all. But if we are as brief as that, no one will see the answer.
Where means in what place, which means in what location in space. But God is a spirit, and a spirit does not occupy space; only bodies need space. Yet we do say that God is everywhere. How can he be everywhere if he is not in space at all?
Follow closely. Everywhere means where everything is. The phrase “God is everywhere” means that God is in everything. Clearly a spiritual being is not in a material being as water is in a cup. We must look for a different meaning for the word in. A spiritual being is said to be where it operates, in the things that receive the effects of its power. My soul, for instance, is in every part of my body, not by being spread out so that every bodily part has a little bit of soul to itself, but because the soul’s life-giving energies pour into every part of the body. Everything whatsoever receives the energy of God, bringing it into existence and keeping it there; that is the sense in which God is omnipresent, is everywhere, in everything. It is no convenience for God of course. He does not need things. But they need him, desperately.
We can now look at the second part of our heckler’s question-“before the universe was created.” Just as where is a word of space-and God is not in space-so before is a word of time-and God is not in time, either.
What is time? Augustine gave the superb answer: “I know what time is-provided you don’t ask me.” But he went on from there, and so must we. Time is the measurement of change. Things go on changing, and time measures the changes. A watch whose hands do not move will not tell the time-because time measures change. Where nothing changes, there is nothing for time to measure, so there is no time. Our material universe is continuously changing, and time belongs to it. God is changeless, so time has no meaning in relation to him. We are in time, God is in eternity.
If this sort of thing is new to you, it may be difficult at first. Keep thinking it over. God is changeless because he is infinite. He has all perfections. He cannot lose any of them, so there is no past into which they can flow away. Nor is there any future from which new perfections can flow to him. He has all perfections, in the present, a present that does not change and does not cease. Another word for this is eternity. The universe he created is not like that. Things come and go. Change is continuous. Time and the universe started together.
We must concentrate upon the concept of eternity; it brings us deep into the meaning of God. You and I and all of us are in time, which means that we are never at any moment the whole of ourselves. What we were last year, what we shall be next year, all belongs to our total being; but last year has gone and next year has not arrived. There never is a moment when we are all there. We possess our being, the philosophers say, successively. Not so God. All that he is, he possesses in one single act of being. Eternity does not mean everlasting time, time open at both ends, so that however far you go back into the past there is no beginning, however far you go forward in the future, there is no end. Eternity is not time at all. It is God’s total possession of himself. . . .
God, we have seen, is changeless. This might strike us as involving him in infinite stagnation. For us, with our matter-bound habits, activity seems unthinkable without change; but this, as we see looking closer, is because we are finite.
The first great activity of the infinite Spirit is knowing. With us this activity involves an immensity of change, learning what we had not known, forgetting what we had; in both cases the change comes from our finiteness, in the one case from ignorance, in the other from a defect of memory. But God knows all things merely by being God, and there is no forgetfulness for him. His activity of knowing is at once limitless and changeless; he is omniscient.
His other great activity is loving; and that again for men involves change, waxing and waning, finding new objects, losing hold upon things already loved; here again the change comes from our limitations. God loves with infinite loving-power: no loss possible, no increase conceivable. He knows and loves with infinite intensity, and this is not stagnation but measureless vitality.
God is all-powerful, too. There are no limits to what he can do, no limits to what he can make. The most powerful man cannot make anything of nothing at all. He needs some material to work upon, and in the absence of material his power must lie all locked up within him and unusable. That is a solid limitation, and God lacks it. He needs no material-he creates.
“Can God make a weight so heavy that he cannot lift it?” asks the unbeliever. He feels he has us cornered. If we say yes, then God cannot lift it; if we say no, then God cannot make it. (The reader might do well to pause here and think out how he would answer this.) Our reply is that God can indeed do all things, but self-contradiction is not a thing. God cannot make a four-sided triangle, because the terms contradict each other and cancel out. A four-sided triangle is meaningless; it is not a thing at all, it is nothing. A weight that an almighty Being cannot lift is as much a contradiction in terms as a four-sided triangle. It too is nothing. And (to give an old text a new emphasis) nothing is impossible to God.
Because God is infinite, there is no distinction between his attributes and himself. This is difficult to put briefly, but we must try. Take knowledge, and begin with our own. My knowing is something that I do, but it is not myself. This may not strike us as a limitation, but it is-a considerable one. If only my knowledge were myself, I should be knowing all the time, simply by being; I should not have to make a distinct effort to know; I should never forget. But, as it is, my knowledge is less than myself; I am finite enough, heaven knows, but my knowledge is more finite still.
Now, God’s knowing is not subject to this limitation. It is not distinct from himself. It is himself. If it were not, if there were really a distinction between his knowledge and himself, then he would have something that his knowledge lacked. In that event his knowledge would not be infinite, and we should have to face the monstrosity of an infinite God with limited knowledge.
This applies to all his attributes. Just as God is knowledge, so he is love, he is justice, he is mercy. We have to think of them as distinct in order to think of them at all; but in him they are not distinct from his very self, and therefore not from one another. Whatever God has, he is. And these attributes are not less themselves for being infinite. God’s love would not be greater by being distinct from his very self as ours is.
It is a difficult idea for our minds. But then God must be mysterious to the beings he made of nothing. Live with it; keep it in the mind. Our feeling that the attributes must be distinct will grow less, and we shall begin to “see” their oneness in God.