This book is so rich that barely a page in my copy does not have one or more passages marked off. Boyle looks at six views of the human spirit: Genesis, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Jean Calvin, and William Harvey. While she sees links among them, she is presenting them as individuals, and not as representatives of eras or schools.
Boyle makes the case that the phrase rûaḥ ʾĕlōhîm, rûaḥ in Genesis 1:2 refers to spirit, not breath or wind, as it has alternatively been translated. Using phrases from other parts of the Bible and from Ugaritic texts but also using ornithology and avian flight patterns, she shows that mĕraḥepet as an action was used one other time, in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it must refer to the soaring of an eagle, an action that can only fit with spirit. Thus, rûaḥ ʾĕlōhîm was “the divine Spirit” that was “the source of the human spirit made ‘in our image, after our likeness’” (54). Boyle's persuasive arguments about spirit in Genesis are unfortunately marred by some repeated mistransliterations from the Hebrew: mayim pěnēy (47) instead of pěnēy ha-mayim, nišěmaḥ (47, 53, 63) instead of nišěmaṭ, and ḥayiyim (52, 53) instead of ḥayyim.
The chapter on Paul concentrates on his letters to the Corinthians. Boyle argues that the standard translations mislead the reader into thinking that Paul's human spirit (pneuma tou anthrōpou) referred to the inward self. Instead, she maintains that Paul emphasized the relationship of the human spirit to the divine spirit: “the human spirit, as a creature, could be made receptive to the divine Spirit, as its Creator” (62); moreover, there was “a similarity between the human spirit and the divine Spirit because of the creation of humans in God's image and likeness” (100).
As Boyle moves into the Middle Ages with Augustine and Aquinas, she sees further change: to both, the human mind became the mirror of the Trinity; furthermore, both “psychologized about humanity by converting spirit to soul” (6). Like Paul, Augustine stressed the relationship between the divine and human spirit. But as human beings were “an impure mixture of immateriality and materiality” (130), he “defined the human spirit by its immaterial mind or soul, whose supreme, pure, infallible act was the intellectual vision of the immaterial” (130). Aquinas also saw the divine spirit in the human mind. But to Augustine, “the spiritual in humans was the intermediate part of the soul, between its corporeal and intellectual perceptions. For Aquinas, the spiritual in humans was the intellective part of the soul” (164).
Boyle shows that Calvin and Harvey represent different facets of the early modern experience. Calvin rejected Augustine's “creational basis” for the “divine Trinity as mirrored in the human mind. … For he believed that Adam's fall shattered the interior glass of the mind” (204); therefore, it “rendered the intellect and the will incapacitated or dysfunctional” (215). Thus, instead of just the mind, “Calvin asserted that the whole human was created to God's image since human nature surpassed and tacitly opposed that of all other animals” (217). This contrasts very sharply with Harvey. The royal physician under James I, Harvey is best known today for his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Boyle justifies including him among theologians because he was “an explorer of the human spirit, although through anatomical exercises, not biblical exegeses” (238). But “whereas theologians had insistently distinguished human spirit from animal spirit, Harvey's project of an Aristotelian natural philosophy was comparatively inclusive” (242–43). To Harvey there was no difference between the human and the animal spirit, and the spirit of both was in the blood.
Did Harvey believe both had the same spirit because he was a physician, or did he believe that he could study humans through experimentation on animals because both had the same spirit? With this, as with so many questions, Boyle does not speculate beyond what the texts tell us. But with her close readings she helps us to understand the importance of attitudes toward the human spirit through two and a half millennia, of which this review gives a mere inkling.
