{The Spirit of God in Man [continued]}[3rd August 1989]

[Redbook6:188-189][19890803:0908b]{The Spirit of God in Man [continued]}[3rd August 1989]

19890803.0908

[continued]

But* so far as the idea of the Spirit of God being within every Man (ie not just every Christian) is concerned, the problem is partly one of words. We talk about the World perceived through our bodily senses as external, probably because it does give the impression of being outside our centre of perception-awareness. We contrast this with mental experiences which are not perceptions through our bodily senses; thus we describe these as inner experiences.

I doubt whether any Jew or Christian would care to deny that our experience of God is an inner experience: even the sense of the numinous,** brought about by nature or art, is an inner reaction separate from our perception of the external item.*** I doubt, too, whether any Christian would deny that the Holy Spirit of God exists independently of each of us, and before each of us becomes directly (ie in an inner sense) aware of it.

It follows that when we talk, on the one hand, of the Holy Spirit descending on us through the Grace of Christ, eg at or after (but not before) Baptism (as the washing away of sins); or on the other hand, of the Spirit of God being within every Man but being veiled from the inner sense of many Men (eg by stains on the Soul) – then these are two ways of describing the same thing.

The point is that there are no dimensions of space within the Inner World: ‘in’ or ‘within’ and ‘descending’ are the best we have to describe senses of quality rather than direction, and we are left therefore only to argue about such matters as whether Baptism is the only key to Grace.

*[See last previous entry]

**[eg William Wordsworth,

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’:

‘...And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being….’

]

***[although it may not feel that way – see eg fn** above; & earlier Vol(s) []]

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