Spirituality

• 1. Introduction

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  Spirituality has no single, widely agreed-upon definition. One survey of scholarly reviews, compiled by McCarroll, gathered twenty-seven explicit definitions, among which there was little agreement. That disorder is not a footnote to the subject. It is the subject. A word that once meant one precise thing now stretches across temples, laboratories, self-help meetings, and the private inner life of people who claim no religion at all. How did a term born inside early Christianity come to describe a poll respondent in the United States who calls themselves spiritual but not religious? What did it mean to be animated by God, and what does it mean now to seek the deepest values and meanings by which people live? The threads that follow trace a word that kept changing its mind about what it was.

• 2. A Word That Keeps Shifting

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  The Latin spiritus carried a cluster of meanings at once: soul, ghost, courage, vigor, breath. It traces back to spirare, to breathe, and in the Vulgate it translated the Greek pneuma and the Hebrew ruach. Spirit meant the animating or vital principle in man and animals. Words translatable as spirituality first began to arise in the 5th century, yet only entered common use toward the end of the Middle Ages. In a Biblical context the term meant being animated by God, and the New Testament framed it as being driven by the Holy Spirit rather than rejecting that influence. In the 11th century the meaning turned. The word began to denote the mental aspect of life against the material and sensual, described as the ecclesiastical sphere of light against the dark world of matter. By the 13th century it had gained two further layers. Socially it marked the territory of the clergy, the ecclesiastical against secular authority. Psychologically it named the inner life: purity of motives, affections, intentions, the analysis of the feelings. The 17th and 18th centuries split spirituality into higher and lower forms, and tied the word to mysticism and quietism, where it picked up a negative meaning.

• 3. Inventing The Modern Sense

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  Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived from 1803 to 1882, pioneered the idea of spirituality as a distinct field. He was a major figure in Transcendentalism, an early 19th-century liberal Protestant movement rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of Hume, and Neoplatonism. The Transcendentalists made intuition the criterion for truth, following Schleiermacher, and read the first translations of Hindu texts as they appeared. The Theosophical Society searched Asian religions for secret teachings and shaped modernist streams including Neo-Vedanta, the revival of Theravada Buddhism, and Buddhist modernism. Anthroposophy followed, whose founder Rudolf Steiner wanted a genuine Western spirituality that could transform education, agriculture, and medicine. The perennial philosophy carried Asian influence further, and its main proponent Aldous Huxley drew deeply on Swami Vivekananda's Neo-Vedanta and universalism. Neo-Vedanta itself, also called neo-Hinduism and Hindu Universalism, formed in response to western colonialism. Universalism reached India through missionaries and shaped neo-Hinduism via Ram Mohan Roy's Brahmo Samaj. Vivekananda then carried that universalism back to the West.

• 4. Spiritual But Not Religious

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  After the Second World War, spirituality and theistic religion drifted apart, and spirituality leaned toward subjective experience over attempts to place the self within a broader ontological context. A new discourse blended humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions, and eastern religions, aiming to reach the true self through self-disclosure, free expression, and meditation. Carl Jung had already pressed this concern. In his 1928 work The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, he wrote that the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche, but seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. Jung believed something was missing in modern man, a sense of the mystical or the spiritual. The distinction between spiritual and religious grew common in the popular mind during the late 20th century, alongside rising secularism and the New Age movement. Authors such as Chris Griscom and Shirley MacLaine explored it in their books. Paul Heelas noted the rise of what he called seminar spirituality, structured offerings that paired consumer choice with spiritual options. According to one 2005 poll, about 24 percent of the United States population identifies itself as spiritual but not religious.

• 5. The Living Traditions

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  Spirituality in Judaism may involve Jewish ethics, prayer, meditation, Shabbat and holiday observance, Torah study, dietary laws, and teshuvah, all done communally. Kabbalah, literally receiving, is an esoteric discipline explaining the relationship between the eternal Ein Sof and the finite universe, and its interpretations live within Hasidic Judaism, founded in 18th-century Eastern Europe by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov. The Musar movement, first founded in the 19th century by Israel Salanter, focuses on character traits such as faith, humility, and love. Christian spirituality is the practice of living out a personal faith, and Pope Francis described it as encouraging a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. Islam offers the greater jihad, the inner struggle of a believer against one's ego, a non-violent meaning stressed by Muslim and non-Muslim authors alike. Sufism, defined by its adherents as the inner mystical dimension of Islam, is famous through Rumi and Hafiz, and a Sheikh or pir transmits its discipline to students. Classical Sufi scholars defined it as a science whose objective is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God.

• 6. The Indian Paths

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  Jainism, known as Jain Dharma, rests on three pillars: ahimsa or non-violence, anekantavada or non-absolutism, and aparigraha or non-attachment. Its motto, Parasparopagraho jivanam, holds that the function of souls is to help one another. The tradition traces its history through twenty-four Tirthankaras, the twenty-fourth being Mahavira around 600 BCE. Hinduism has no centralized religious authority, no governing body, no prophets, and no binding holy book, and Hindus may be polytheistic, monotheistic, or atheistic. Within that open structure it identifies three marga of practice: Jnana, the way of knowledge; Bhakti, the way of devotion; and Karma yoga, the way of selfless action. In the 19th century Vivekananda added Raja yoga, the way of contemplation, as a fourth way, calling all of them yoga. The Chandogyopanishad and the Shvetashvatara Upanishad carried on a rigorous debate over the relative merits of these practices, warning against the false ascetic who performs the mechanics without meditating on the nature of Self. Sikhism treats spiritual and secular life as intertwined, and Guru Nanak prized an active, creative, and practical life over a purely contemplative one. The 6th Guru, Hargobind, affirmed that the temporal Miri and the spiritual Piri coexist, a balance the 10th Guru, Gobind Singh, developed into the concept of the Saint Soldier.

• 7. Spirituality Without The Sacred

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  Secular spirituality emphasizes humanistic ideas on moral character, qualities such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and a concern for others, without necessarily accepting belief in a supernatural reality. Many humanists reject this usage as overly broad, treating it as a way of saying that everything good and virtuous is necessarily spiritual. Bertrand Russell, a self-described agnostic renowned as an atheist, still valued the non-material. In 1930 he wrote that one's ego is no very large part of the world, and that the man who can center his thoughts on something transcending self can find a certain peace impossible to the pure egoist. Aristotle, one of the first Western thinkers to derive morality and goodness without appealing to supernatural forces, argued that men create Gods in their own image, not the other way around. Critics on both sides call secular spirituality obscurantism, noting that words such as morality, philanthropy, and humanism already describe its prosocial meaning without confusion. Spirituality has, even so, held a central role in some self-help movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which warned that an alcoholic who failed to enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice could not survive the trials ahead. Such treatment approaches have been challenged as pseudoscience.

• 8. What The Science Finds

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  Various studies, most originating from North America, report a positive correlation between measures of spirituality and mental well-being, in healthy people and in those facing physical illness or psychological disorders. Whether that correlation represents a causal link remains contentious, partly because of ongoing disagreement over how spirituality should be defined and measured. Some evidence suggests an agreeable temperament or a tendency toward sociability, both of which correlate with spirituality, might be the real psychological drivers of well-being. Masters and Spielmans conducted a meta-analysis of distant intercessory prayer and found no discernible health effects from being prayed for by others. One rigorous study by Herbert Benson and colleagues found that intercessory prayer had no effect on recovery from cardiac arrest, and that patients told people were praying for them had an increased risk of medical complications. Neuroscientists examining brain function during reported spiritual experiences found certain neurotransmitters and specific brain areas involved, and experimenters induced such experiences with psychoactive agents that elicit euphoria. These findings led some theorists to speculate that spirituality may be a benign subtype of psychosis. To measure the contested term, MacDonald and colleagues gave an Expressions of Spirituality Inventory to over 4000 persons across eight countries, results that highlighted the difficulty of measuring spirituality across cultures.