“…and thou hearest the sound thereof”
a quick note on the topic of what might be called “semantic evolution”
This is a quick note on the topic of what might be called “semantic evolution,” which Landon and I explored in much greater depth in What Barfield Thought.1
Philology and etymology reveal a distinct and ubiquitous pattern in which earlier, more comprehensive terms later differentiate into separate meanings. Here is an example from the Gospel according to John in which one word, Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus, is employed in two apparently disjunctive ways even in a single sentence:
The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma].
In the first instance, the word is often supposed to be a literal reference to wind. Hence, “the [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof.” In the second instance, pneuma is supposed to refer, by way of metaphor, to that which is meant by the English word “spirit” (including, in this instance, the personal and theological overtones that come with the translator’s use of a definite article and capital “S”). The term pneuma as rendered in the phrase “everyone born of the Spirit,” is therefore understood to indicate something different than the pneuma which “bloweth where it listeth.” It would seem that this single word, taken in either its Greek or Latin equivalents, can mean any number of things, from “spirit,” to “wind,” to “breath,” to “life,” to “mind.”
We ordinarily assume, when we read this, that it must be metaphorical, figurative, or an artifice of poetic conceit when spiritus is employed in such an ambivalent fashion. But why not take the writers at their word? As a rule, when people call something by the same name, it’s because they perceive it to be the same thing. Consider, again, the diversity of the perceptual aspects compassed by the single term “water,” as Helen Keller portrayed this in her autobiography. “Water” is one thing that appears in a thousand ways and she needed first to grasp the term “water,” as a verbum cordis or “word of the heart” before she could recognize its myriad instances outside of her.
Why not conceive of spiritus in the same way? Of course, to do this, we would have to “unthink” many of the familiar concepts of today, which anatomize the world into discrete and separate, quantifiable units. But in order to anatomize something into units, you have to first start with a unity that can be so anatomized. Maybe the units are more like members, and “the world” is less like a heap and an aggregate and more like an organism, of which humanity is an essential organ. This seems much closer to the Biblical view than anything we can arrive at today through the ordinary methods of science.
We often imagine that science and religion were engaged in a sort of struggle for dominance and that science ultimately had the last word. But as I have tried to show, this is a tendentious reading of history.2 Recall again the intimate and inexorable relationship between perception and conception; our perception is a function of our intentionality; what we look for conditions what we can see. This topic is almost inexhaustible so I will leave it at this suggestion with the hope of continuing the exploration on another occasion.
For instance, it is ordinarily imagined that Copernicus feared the censure of the Catholic Church and therefore refrained from publishing his heliocentric doctrine, whereas in fact he recognized that his model was itself scientifically inferior to the reigning Copernican one.
The misrepresentation is due, in part, to the fact that, as the old adage goes, “the victors write the history,” and the centuries since that time have seen, by and large, a progressive decline of the influence of the Christian worldview at the hands of the Scientific one. In other words, the tale of history is popularly told from the standpoint of the ascendancy of Science. I have noted on prior occasions that, with the advance of time, the divergence between the Church and Science increased. This might seem like an obvious or trivial point until the temptation to back-project the apparently categorical difference that exists today onto a time before the two outlooks had actually diverged. Just as “Adam” before Eve was really Adam-Eve, so up until the critical revolutionary moment in the 17th century, “The Catholic Church” was the bearer of not only the religious, cultural, philosophical, intellectual, and doctrinal elements that we might associate with it today, but also the scientific ones. Technically, it is an anachronism to talk about elements of science as we know it in a time before the discipline had been stipulated and designated to which the term was applied just as it would present a somewhat usual use of language to refer to Eve before she was differentiated from Adam’s side.
But another, more essential reason that the events in question are almost always misrepresented is an absence of critical reflection on the nature and philosophy of Science as such. Specifically, we can ask, like Pilate, Quid est veritas? “What is truth?” While the Christian religion gives one answer, summed up in the doctrine of Transcendentals promulgated by the Platonists, early Church Fathers, and Scholastics, and which was summed by Aquinas’ statements that:
Nothing is known except truth, which is the same as being
and
as the Good is convertible with Being, so is the True
Science gives a substantially different one. “Truth,” in science, does not directly refer to Being. Indeed, these are hardly scientific concepts. Instead, “truth” has no other standard in Science than “the ability to make accurate predictions.” Confer Stephen Hawking in a somewhat rare moment of humility in respect to the boundaries of his field:
Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true...one can use either picture as a model of the universe...the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest....If there are two models that both agree with observation, then one cannot say that one is more real than another.
In other words, popular opinion notwithstanding, the saga indicated above is not really a question of competing theories of planetary motion, but of competing theories of truth, with the Church upholding the traditional conception of truth and Science advancing a novel one.
One note on the latter: once the standard of truth is untethered from Being, it becomes impossible to establish definitively. Indeed, the quest for falsification of existing theories and periodic revolution of paradigms constitute the very engine and driving force of scientific progress. Obviously, in respect to the case in question, it is senseless to consider the Copernican view the last word on the matter, even in the scientific sense, let alone the absolute one because:
it wasn’t until Kepler came along decades later and incorporated the elliptical orbits into the model that the Copernican theory was able to compare with the Ptolemaic one merely in respect to the accuracy of its predictions and
the decision to limit the model to the specific location of the sun in respect to our particular solar system is scientifically arbitrary and any other stipulated center around which planetary motion should be modeled would give a very different picture.
Great note! It's interesting how the "mere metaphorical" view can only come about when the immediate meaning of natural phenomena is considered secondary to the reflective meaning of our abstract concepts, i.e. quantitative properties that have been isolated from the whole experience.
When we are walking outside on a hot and stagnant summer day, and a strong gust of wind blows through from mysterious origins, the first thing we experience is not the oscillation of airwaves or the pressure differentials, but the meaning of refreshment and renewal of our old sweaty state of experience, which is practically the functional meaning of Spirit.
And some say the spirit of deceased ones blow in the wind.