89. Spooks and Virtues

Good American boy goes to college. Good American parents are afraid he'll lose his morals. Good American boy comes home and sure enough, he's lost his morals. Painful parent-son conversations.

That was the story in many families in the days before parents themselves had been to college, or daughters went there. In the United States, where masses of uneducated immigrants were rapidly enabled, by wealth or the GI bill, to polish their children, it's heard as a peculiarly American story. That may be, but the pain in it, I think, is simply Christian. It's peculiar to the Christian vocabulary.

Take that word "spirit." It started out as Latin spiritus referring to what went in and out of your throat when you breathe. Keep it there and you're alive. Lose it and you're dead. Where does it go? (It's a thing; it has to go someplace.) The ancients were pretty vague about that but the Christians who came along weren't. It (as Anglo-Saxon "soul") went to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether the dead person had been good or not.

But besides referring to a thing the word also, from a very early time, referred to an abstraction. The soul wasn't just something that went along with you and left you; it was you. Not the everyday, apparent you, though, and not even a summation of that apparent you. It was the essence of the apparent you, and all your values were bundled into it. The Greeks made sure this reference stuck.

So, just by the way the language developed, Christians entered the 20th century with this one word that made two very different references, one to a thing and the other to an essence. There is a connection, of course (a good essence gets the thing into heaven), but you need a God to make that connection. It's not necessary.

Now, those parent-son conversations. The son says that because of what he has learned in his science courses he's lost his belief in spirits — like God and human souls. His parents hear that he's lost his belief in values. Naturally. Values are "spiritual" things. They misunderstand his situation and are in pain.

You can't entirely blame the parents for their misunderstanding. Spirits and values have a lot in common. They're both invisible, they're both insubstantial, and neither dies. It's easy to see how thoughtful people of any education might slide from "spiritual" into "transcendent" and "otherworldly" and finally into "supernatural," tying goodness to a heaven.

I'd put some of the blame on the language the parents inherited. It's Halloween today. There are a lot of spirits out there, on front porches and roaming the streets. Are they spiritual? Not those things. But how can you be a "spirit" and not be "spiritual"? What kind of language has one word for both spooks and virtues?