SPIRITUALISM. – A philosophically ambiguous term whose meaning is not easily definable, given the variety of its senses. Moreover, under this name it is possible to group together metaphysical, moral, psychological, etc. doctrines, some of which, when examined in depth, prove to be negative toward the spirit as such. Here we limit ourselves to examining the principal senses and providing a theoretical orientation to distinguish the true from the false. The following entries should be consulted alongside this one: ANIMA, INTELLETTO, SPIRITO, SPIRITUALE.
There is a spontaneous form of spiritualism, in a certain sense instinctive in man: the spiritual is above nature, the spiritual above the material. This common experience, which is highly indicative, is the subject of reflection, which first encounters the problem of the relationship between spirit and nature. Depending on how this problem is resolved (metaphysically, of course)—that is, depending on the relationship that is established (of identity, opposition, etc.)—one arrives at different or distinct spiritualistic, materialistic, naturalistic conclusions, according to how spirit (q.v.), nature (q.v.), and matter (q.v.) are conceived.
There is a spiritualism that may be called absolute: everything is spirit (monism [q.v.]), as opposed to materialism; and everything is matter (q.v.). In this sense, transcendental idealism has defined itself as absolute spiritualism: nature is a dialectical moment of the Spirit, always resolved within it; the so-called matter is a pure “phenomenon” or a lower degree that is surpassed by the very movement of the Spirit (this doctrine is common to all forms of pantheism [q.v.], which resolve and annihilate the world in God). But if one considers it carefully, this radical spiritualism is, in the end, absolute naturalism (q.v.) and also animism (q.v.), albeit philosophically more mature than the ancient and prescientific variety (e.g., Telesio [q.v.]). Indeed, the “spiritualization” of nature and matter, given the perfect adequation between nature and spirit (inevitable in every immanentist conception), resolves itself into the “naturalization” of the Spirit. It may seem paradoxical, but the spiritualistic monism of modern idealism is, in the end, materialistic monism; so much so that Marx (q.v.) derived his from Hegel (q.v.). Absolute spiritualism, in this sense, does not proceed from the Spirit (metaphysically), but from Nature conceived initially as unconscious thought that agitates it from within. In ancient Greece, Stoicism (q.v.), for example, presupposes this original and final monism (which is materialistic), expressed by Virgil in the celebrated verse: “Mens agitat molem.” In modern idealism, its most coherent and significant form is found in Schelling (q.v.): Nature is the preparation of consciousness; it works unconsciously to produce it; therefore, the ego is nothing but a product of Nature, in which the unconscious thought that it is becomes conscious. Consciousness is nothing but Nature itself at the height of its self-potentiality, and Nature is nothing but consciousness de-potentiated, the prehistory of the spirit; Nature is visible Spirit, Spirit is invisible Nature (Agius [1829] to the Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, 1797). The task of all science is to construct the emergence of a fixed product (Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, 1799, § 6). From the standpoint of Absolute Reason (“total indifference of the subjective and the objective”), everything is one and indivisible. Outside of Reason, which is “simply one and equal to itself,” there is nothing; and nothing is a being outside of absolute identity, which is “one with Reason.” Within itself, there is no antithesis between Subject and Object, but only “quantitative difference”; “absolute identity is not the cause of the Universe, but is the Universe itself” (Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, 1801, §§ 1-33). The movement of reason (of philosophy) is to de-differentiate, to proceed from the differentiated to identity, that is, to reabsorb the world into the Absolute, which is Spirit or Nature indifferently. And so, as was said, absolute spiritualism, in the idealism of Schelling (but also in that of Hegel’s logic and Gentile’s “actual” idealism [q.v.]), is absolute naturalism, or naturalistic monism, of which spirit and matter are two forces that balance the expansion of nature; which is to say that undifferentiated Nature “appears” as matter and as spirit (see also System des transzendentalen Idealismus, 1800, sect. III, ch. II, § 2).
A different form of absolute spiritualism is Berkeley’s immaterialism (q.v.): “only spirits really exist; matter has no other existence than that of being perceived” (Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, 1713, D. 1).
Spiritualism, with the exception of the monistic form, always implies a dualistic conception: spirit and body (psychological spiritualism); spiritual life and animal nature (moral and sociological spiritualism), depending on whether one considers the individual or society; spiritual substance and material or extended substance (ontological spiritualism); or mechanism and life; spirit or flesh (religious spiritualism in the Christian sense). However, duality alone is not sufficient for a doctrine to be defined as spiritualist; it is also necessary to admit: a) the independence of the spirit from the body or nature; b) its individuality from matter; c) its supremacy over the body. Naturally, the way in which duality is understood (as opposition, heterogeneity, etc.) determines how the relationship between spirit and body, spirit and nature is understood. Here, it may be said, is the touchstone of every spiritualistic theory: a) radical dualism between spirit or soul and body or matter? In this case, the unity of the human composite is compromised: the ontological opposition between spirit and body inevitably leads to attributing to one qualities opposite to those of the other, making them two enemies in perpetual conflict; b) duality, yes, but understood in such a way as not to compromise the substantial unity that is each individual man? This doctrine may run the risk (as in Aristotle) of making the ontological distinction between spirit and body doubtful (and consequently, the personal immortality of the soul), but it has the advantage of not opposing one to the other, of not making their relationship suspicious, and of not pushing things to the point of denying all positivity to matter, of making it “non-being” or “absolutely formless.” The first thesis may be broadly defined as “Platonic”; the second as “Aristotelian,” provided it is kept in mind that there can be Platonic spiritualism without accepting Plato’s rigid ontological dualism (q.v.), e.g., St. Augustine (q.v.), just as there can be Aristotelian spiritualism without falling into the dangers of naturalism, e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas (q.v.). With this, the form of spiritualism that, when critically examined, proves to be the only true and authentic one is already indicated; namely, ontological spiritualism (which is also psychological, moral, sociological, pedagogical, aesthetic, and even religious), which is proper to the Christian tradition, both Augustinian and Thomistic, which, founded rationally, is in harmony with revealed truth insofar as it is based on a metaphysics (also rigorously rational, though not “rationalistic”) that is ethical and creationist.
Set aside for the moment, strictly speaking, one cannot properly speak of spirit in the full sense before Christianity, which made known—through Revelation (in fact, not by right)—the concepts of creation and of spirit as a personal substance created by God. In Greek philosophy, spirit is still conceived materialistically (v. SPIRITO) or as an impersonal entity (soul), understood as an eternal element immanent (or in contact) with physical and human nature; hence psychism: the ψυχή is the (cosmic) principle of life and, as such, is eternal; it is found in nature (“World Soul”) and manifests itself in different degrees (as vegetative soul or life in plants, sensitive soul in animals, rational soul in humans), of which the higher includes the lower ones. In this sense, the first to consider the intellect (νοῦς) explicitly as the metaphysical principle of all things was Anaxagoras (v.); yet precisely the νοῦς of Anaxagoras is a “physical force,” “the lightest (ἐπιστότου) and purest (καθαρώτατον) of all things, of which it is the soul (ψυχή), knowledge, and order” (fr. 12, Diels); in short, the νοῦς is “the principle of motion,” which stirs inert matter, causing “the separation of all things” (fr. 13). Thus the νοῦς is an “animated” principle (psychism) and not yet spiritual, resolving a “physical” problem; it is not yet spirit or consciousness, so much so that “intelligence” is not its primary quality, let alone its essence. Plato (Phaedo, 97b–98c) and Aristotle perceived this, the latter noting that Anaxagoras uses the νοῦς only “as a mechanism in the process of constituting the world” (Metaphysics, I, 985a).
Through Socrates (v.), spirit is formulated for the first time explicitly and clearly by Plato through the dualism of two worlds: the sensible world of things and the intelligible world of Ideas. This dualism is: a) metaphysical, between Being (Ideas) and becoming (things); b) cosmological, between the Demiurge, the “craftsman” of the world, and eternal matter; c) psychological, between the intellectual soul and the body; d) ethical, between the end of the soul (contemplation of the Ideas) and that of the body (attachment to sensible things). Plato’s dualism, influenced also by religious beliefs (Orphic-Pythagorean), not only compromises—almost to the point of rendering them inexplicable—the relations between soul and body (and thus the unity of the human composite), but does not entirely transcend psychism and cosmologism. Indeed, even for Plato there is a “World Soul” (generated by the Demiurge and therefore not belonging to the intelligible world, Timaeus, 35a and 37a), which is given a twofold motion without itself being the direct cause of motion (as earlier in Phaedrus, 245c). The human soul, immortal because “like” or “akin” to the Ideas (Phaedo, 79c–e), is conceived as a “ruling power” or an entity in itself, which falls into a body without forming a unity with it: the personal immortality of the soul is compromised (v. X). Plato’s spirit is led to these conclusions by his conception of matter (χώρα ἀνάγκη), understood as pure negativity and the principle of evil and corruption. Thus spiritual activity is entirely engaged in fleeing—
—if inferior to Spirit; and so too the unity of the human composite is founded differently and more securely. Here spirit finds its full truth, reclaiming and fulfilling what the Greeks had discovered.
The father of Christian spirit is St. Augustine (v.). To the question of reason, “What do you wish to know?” Augustine replies: “God and the soul—and nothing else” (Soliloquies, I, 1, ch. 2); only insofar as it pertains to man, in whom it finds its meaning, does Augustine concern himself with the problem of the world. Hence the essential “spiritualistic” (and thus “humanistic” and “Christian,” since authentic and complete humanism is only Christian) character of his thought, no longer “cosmological.” Nor is the soul for Augustine essentially will; it is first and foremost intellect (“love the intellect greatly,” Soliloquies, I, 1, ch. 2). God is Truth and the illuminating source of the human mind. Man is soul and body; soul in a body that it vivifies: one cannot understand or define man without taking both into account. Yet man is not two separate substances: “man is a substance composed (constans) of soul and body” and is man both in mind and in flesh. Yet neither does the essence of the body become that of the soul, nor that of the soul that of the body: they make one man without being the same thing. Clearly, here Augustine, on the basis of the principle of creation, departs from Plato’s doctrine of two substances and rejects the view of matter as the source of all evil and of the body as evil, while admitting that the body, if not governed by the soul of which it is an instrument, may impede the realization of the good. Yet the perfect state of man is not in the separation of soul from body, but in their union and cooperation for the good of the spirit, and—after the rupture caused by death—in their reunion through the resurrection of the flesh (On the Greatness of the Soul, ch. 12, no. 22; On the Trinity, I, 15, ch. 7, no. 11; On the Soul and Its Origin, I, 4, ch. 2, no. 3; On the Care to Be Taken for the Dead, ch. 3, no. 5; Sermon 154, ch. 10, no. 15). Thus another fundamental characteristic of Christian spirit is brought to light in contrast to the Greek: the latter is a doctrine of the disincarnation of spirit, the former of incarnation—in a philosophical sense (of the soul in the body, to which it is united) and in a theological sense (the Incarnation of God in Christ).
St. REID, THOMAS (v.) does not seem to dissent from St. Augustine: the world depends on God, who gives it existence (only God exists of Himself: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, aa. 3–4; q. 44, a. 1); the human composite is a “substantial unity” of soul and body. The soul’s essential principle is the intellect, source of all psychic life; yet since the intellectual function is “superorganic” (its object being intelligible forms), it follows that this function can be carried out autonomously, that is, even when the soul is separated from the body. The soul is therefore superior to the body and can subsist apart from it, though it yearns to reunite with the body—a reunion which, as faith teaches, will occur in the resurrection of the flesh (Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 77–78; On Being and Essence, ch. 6, etc.).
Later developments of spiritualism are either a deviation or a deepening of this fundamental position of Greek-Christian spiritualism. In the Renaissance, spiritualism reappears in the form of psychism; Descartes (v.), also under the influence of scientific doctrines, it takes the Platonic form of radical dualism between soul (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), i.e., as a dualism of two “substances” with opposing attributes (thought and freedom, on the one hand; extension and mechanism, on the other). Thus the dualism of “nature” and “spirit,” of “mechanism” and “life” emerges, which pervades all modern thought up to Kant. In this sense, with the exception of human consciousness and God, the Cartesian conception of nature is materialistic and, while differing from that of Epicurus (v.) Gassendi (v.), it prepares the way for the materialism typical of the Enlightenment (v.).
On the other hand, Descartes, with his dualism of the two substances (Principles of Philosophy, I, I, § 53), reopens the problem of the relationship between soul and body and provokes, on the one hand, Spinoza’s (v.) monistic solution and, on the other, Malebranche’s (v.) occasionalism and Leibniz’s (v.) ambiguous solution, whose monadism, which claims to be spiritualistic, can also be interpreted in a naturalistic sense. It must be immediately added, however, that for Leibniz matter is no longer a substance (as it is also for Spinoza) and the world is not a set of mechanical and geometrical phenomena. The human body is composed of an infinity of monads, dominated by the soul-monad (Principles of Nature and Grace, §§ 3–4).
Modern rationalism, despite its errors, must be credited with having deepened the concept of spirit as consciousness (cogito), which is not a given but a principle of knowledge and conscious unification, self-consciousness. But rationalism itself, on the one hand, paves the way for the identification of the “intellectual” with the “spiritual” and, on the other, for the conception of spirit as pure activity (no longer as substance), consisting, as essence, in the intellectual relations by which it unifies experience. This compromises the personal immortality of the soul and opens the way to transcendental idealism, for which it is not individual selves that are immortal, but only eternal Thought or the Absolute Ego.
Kant (v.) already limits knowledge of the soul to its functions (to “transcendentality”) and denies any rational demonstration of its immortality (Critique of Pure Reason, pt. II; Transcendental Dialectic, I, I, ch. 1, § 2). Transcendental idealism, from Fichte (v.) GENTILI (v.), which reduces everything to processes—conscious and unconscious—of the Absolute Thought that comes into being in the very becoming of nature and history and is this very becoming, whose outcome is the Absolute’s conquest of itself in the transparency of fully unfolded Idea (Hegel), on the one hand denies the immortality and personality of the soul (“the only immortality one can think of... is the immortality of the transcendent Ego”: Gentile, Teoria generale dello Spirito come atto puro, Bari 1924, p. 128, 4th ed.) and, on the other, identifies God with the very “I think” and this with History (absolute immanence). Thus spirit is lost, and the so-called “philosophies of spirit” ([v.] such as, e.g., Croce’s) are, in the end, philosophies of nature, once there is adequation between world and spirit, indeed identity (monism). Absolute idealism and absolute positivism thus coincide.
But idealism, especially Gentile’s, has deepened the concept of self-consciousness (Spirit as thinking in act and self-criticism); and this concept, insofar as it contains truth, must be recovered and fulfilled in classical Christian spiritualism, also for its very significant contributions to pedagogical spiritualism, as attested by Gentile’s Sommario di pedagogia (1912). In general, modern thought from Descartes to Hegel and post-Hegelian (with the exception of currents that have remained within the line of classical metaphysics) has lost or altered the concept of spirit and the principles of spiritualism, even if pre-Kantian rationalism, Kant’s criticism, and post-Kantian idealistic currents have maintained spirit’s primacy and vigorously upheld that spiritual acts (intellective and volitive) are not entirely explicable by physiological phenomena, in contrast to the naive and crude claims of ancient and modern naturalism.
The Cartesian dualism between “nature” or mechanism and “spirit” or freedom has also been maintained in Kant’s original and profound elaboration in the Critique of Practical Reason, which idealism, from Fichte to Gentile, further develops into a conception in which the “I think” is assumed as the metaphysical principle of all reality as such. The antithesis between nature and spirit is taken up again, from an original standpoint, Bergson (v.) as an opposition between spirit and geometrical necessity and spatiality (L’évolution créatrice, ch. 3) or between “intuition and intellect,” or again between “dynamic” and “static” morality and religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion).
Classical Christian spiritualism, however, found further development and fulfillment in Italian spiritualism of the first half of the 19th century CAPPONI, GINO (v.), Tommaseo (v.), LAMBRUSCHINI, LUIGI (v.), etc., and above all ROSMINIANI (v.), Gioberti (v.), who distorts it into a form of ontologism (v.) and pantheism (v.), influenced by Hegel (notable, from a psychological standpoint, is the contribution of French spiritualism of the same period, especially that of Maine de Biran [v.]; of no theoretical interest is the eclecticism of Cousin [v.] and his school). Rosmini preserves all the essential concepts of spiritualism (unity of body and spirit and the supremacy and autonomy of the latter; God as creator and transcendent, and the analogical relationship between God and creation, etc.), but at the same time resolves the problems posed by modern thought (and especially those of spirit as consciousness and self-consciousness and the critical foundation of metaphysics), so that the entire universe, through man, has its summit in God: in tending toward God, man truly loves himself, is free, and actualizes all the infinite power of his spirit. In the aspiration to and possession of God reside the ultimate end of integral life and human beatitude, and “here lies the supreme excellence of creation” (Principles of Moral Science, ch. III, art. IV). A further development of classical Christian spiritualism, through Augustine and Rosmini, is found in contemporary Christian spiritualism in Italy, in the French “Philosophie de l’esprit” of Lavelle and Le Senne, as well as in some Christian existentialists, such as Marcel.