Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 198

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WINDY WORDS: TOWARDS A PNEUMATIC LINGUISTICS
at avoiding, in our understanding of the past, those ideas and sets
of mind which belong only to the present.11 From any standpoint,
the viewer necessarily sees any other standpoint as limited: we see
what is missing according to our canon, but are by definition blind
to what we lack according to their canon. In this case, it seems we
have developed the habit of standing in a stiff breeze and not expe-
riencing it as a spiritual force, for example the Word of God. The
modern sheep farmer blows down the throat of a new-born lamb to
encourage it to take its first breath, without an awareness of his own
breath as a microcosm of the Spirit of Life. Today we can speak of
seeking ‘inspiration’ in nature without hearing the Latin words for
‘breathe into’ which are still discernible in the word. In short, it is
clear that there is a radical difference in our conception of the world
and that of our ancestors: we have fragmented these concepts into
not more detailed, but different ones. The Hebrew and Greek lan-
guages of the scriptures go back to a time when the wind on the
hillside was the breath of a spiritual being, and so there was no need
for two different words. We breathed it, and it was the spirit which
gave us life; we were in-spired, in-breathed by a higher – or at least
other – force. Ruach and pneuma simply named that force.
Of course, the written word is always conservative, and the
fragmentation of these and other integral concepts had certainly
begun by the time the scriptures were written. We can see this in
the Greek and Latin translations of the ruach of empty verbiage of
Jeremiah and Job which I quoted above: here the Greek has anemos
and the Latin ventus: the fragmentation of concepts has already
begun. English translations before King James are usually content
to use ‘spirit’ where King James has ‘breath’ or ‘wind’, a frag-
mentation also fully apparent in Luther. I have not the expertise to
say to what extent the writer of Ancrene Wisse would have made our
distinctions between wind and spirit. That is not the tenor of my
argument. I am simply making the point that in writing “word is
but wind” he is likely also to have framed the thought in his mind
in Latin, and we are entitled to ask the nature of his ‘wind’ in this
11 Hans-Georg Gadamer would of course take this further: see for instance “The Universality of the
Hermeneutical Problem” in Gadamer 2008: 3–17 (especially p. 9), where he affirms the intrinsic
nature of prejudice in our modes of understanding.
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