The Anatomy of Spirit and Fire: How Reading Ancient Theologians Can Help Us Today
For most people in our time ‘theology’ is an irrelevant subject. If its core ideas are not believed the entire world of arguments around the doctrines of religion seems archaic and ridiculous, most of all to that strata of our society that call themselves philosophers and scientists.
Many words core to the world of religious ideas have themselves become somewhat vestigial in modern thought. ‘Spirit’ or ‘Soul’ are ideas frowned upon as a kind of superstition, ‘Love’ an epiphenomenon of biology or an emotional state , ‘Truth’ alone the realm of what the tools of science can observe.
The fact that these words vessel profundity from wells so deep we have barely begun to empty them is something that resolutely will not be seen in our modern time. In the 1940’s the poet T.S. Eliot wrote: “Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious belief; not so much about the decline of religious sensibility. The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it…
