Wind as Spirit and Life
This passage in Genesis is often interpreted such that the movement described takes the form of a wind. In a quiet moment this evening I was listening to the wind blow through the trees. We live on top of a hill, and there is usually a breeze of some sort blowing through the Maples and the Pines. What is probably obvious to others occurred to me, as it often does for all of us: for the first time and in a flash. The reason that wind is tied to the notion of spirit and life in so many cultures, religions, forms of art and almost naturally in the thought of countless individual human beings is that the wind can only be known to us through its effects.
We can see the cloud of snow or sand it blows; we can sense the direction the wind is moving by watching it whip a flag or turn a weather vane. We can hear it rustle the leaves of the trees or flap the sails. We smell the scents it carries with it. Yet we cannot see the wind itself with our eyes. This brings to mind the assertion of medieval theology that angels could not be in place like physical bodies are, but rather “an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place.” It is in place by virtue of its operation, or an application of its power, not in virtue of a physical body. The reason wind is taken by human beings as analogous to spirit is similar in that for the most part one only knows it by its power, or by its operation on other things we can sense directly. We can feel, see, smell and hear these things, but we are usually certain about the fact that we cannot see the wind itself with our eyes. We only know the wind directly through the sense of touch when it hits our skin.
Even then, we might wonder what the active power is that moves the air, given that we can only feel it through our bodies interrupting its motion. The reason the notion of life is tied to spirit, and that of spirit is tied to wind, is because we have the same question about every living thing around us. No matter how we break down living things physically, we cannot see the inhering, unifying principle within them that makes all their physical parts move and grow (into very determinate and regular forms) with our eyes. Even if one wanted to dispute this, at least no one would maintain that we have seen it yet. (I would argue that the idea we could, in fact, see the principle of life in things as some sort of physical construct, far from being scientific, is a primitive, ignoble, ugly notion whose refutation should be learned at a young age. But that’s another story). We generally and intuitively understand that what we do see moving in living things, whether it be the slow growth of a centuries old tree or a person running a race, are the effects of some interior principle that we are not able to physically grasp.
Sure, we say things like “in the mind’s eye,” and there are deep and weighty reasons for this sort of description, but such phrases are not, strictly speaking, explicating the way in which we grasp ideas. Strictly speaking we do not see ideas, nor do we properly understand them merely by means of a mental picture of some physical thing. In any event, the wind works as a stand in for spirit and life because it is an active force that is hard to sense directly, and is mostly sensed through its effects. We encounter it as a motion in nature that seems to us to be devoid of body, stripped down of physically attached effects growing out of itself, a principle of motion at play that we cannot sense except through the lowest form of sensation (touch), and for which the source of power is puzzling.
When we say the spirit left a man at death, blew over the face of the waters, moved through history, is in the trees, and so forth we are referring to something that we know primarily through its effects.