Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 196

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
John 3.8 is a particularly fine example of the tension between
English and its sources. The King James Version has “The wind
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.” In this passage the original Greek
uses a single word, pneuma, for both ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’, which the
Vulgate echoes with spiritus.8 We can be sure that the underlying
term is the Hebrew ruach. In giving us two terms for the original
one, the King James Version fails to articulate the original under-
standing that the wind that blows as it will, and the spirit of life
that God breathes into his creatures are one and the same thing.
The Catholic Douay-Rheims uses only ‘spirit’ where King James
has ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ in this passage, as do earlier English transla-
tions: the Anglo-Saxon text (probably late 10c.) has gāst ‘spirit’
(Bright 1904: 12), and Wycliffe (late 14c.) has only ‘spirit’. But
Luther’s translation has ‘Wind’ in the first place and ‘Geist’ in the
second, and most later translations into English, including Tyndale,
distinguish between the two terms.
This estrangement between ‘wind’ and ‘spirit’ obscures John’s
allusion to one of the most beautiful and enigmatic of the oldest
Biblical texts at this point, Genesis 1.2: “And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters.” Here again the Spirit of God is
a wind and a breath, ruach, pneuma. The English translation has lost
the image of the wind on the sea, and has lost the ability in one
word to express the spirit of this wind.
Clearly, wind, breath and spirit are different concepts in Modern
English which fall nicely into quite different slots in whatever
construction we imagine for our concepts. But what are we to do
with the Greek text? Is the first pneuma in John 3.8 to be regarded
as a cyclone over the eastern Mediterranean, while the second is a
member of the Christian Trinity? If so, the two pneumata are
homographs with different meanings, like the English lie, and the
Greek text is indulging in an elaborate pun. Puns are admittedly
8 This example, and indeed the burden of what I have to say in this essay about pneuma and the
semantic development of words such as ‘spirit’, are culled from Barfield’s essay “The Meaning of
‘Literal’” (Barfield 1985).
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