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I could never make them understand that the only reason for the Roman Christians making the sign of the Cross from left to right, while the Greeks make it from right to left, is that we say 'spiritus sancti', while they say 'agion pneuma'. "If you said pneuma agion," I used to say, "then you would cross yourself like us, and if we said sancti spiritus we should cross ourselves like you."
But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom, Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the Pneuma. Since the word for 'spirit' is neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, 'Ruah', is mostly feminine. In the meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this goddess.
"Ay am I," answered Cosmo, with a faint pang, and a strange sense of loss: when should he dream its like again! "Soon, soon, Cosmo," he might have heard, could he have interpreted the telephonic signals from the depths of his own being; "wherever the creative pneuma can enter, there it enters, and no door stands so wide to it as that of the obedient heart."
In all older languages, the words used to designate the element bound up with breathing, or the act of breathing, served at the same time to express the relationship of man to the Divine, or even the Divine itself. One need think only of the words Brahma and Atma of the ancient Indians, the Pneuma of the Greeks, the Spiritus of the Romans.
Saul, the man of violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially pneumatic manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit.
According to the "Shepherd of Hermas," an apocalyptic writing nearly contemporary with the gospel of "Mark," the aeon or son of God who existed previous to the creation was not the Christ, or the Sophia, but the Pneuma or Holy Spirit, represented in the Old Testament as the "angel of Jehovah."
Superposed upon this primitive mythologic stratum, we find, in the same narratives, the account of the descent of the pneuma at the time of the baptism; and crowning the whole, there are the two accounts of the nativity which, though conflicting in nearly all their details, agree in representing the divine pneuma as the father of Jesus.
More familiar to the Anglo-Saxon race is the connexion between the soul and the breath; this identification is found both in Aryan and Semitic languages; in Latin we have spiritus, in Greek pneuma, in Hebrew ruach; and the idea is found extending downwards to the lowest planes of culture in Australia, America and Asia.
He compares the mode of nutrition to irrigating canals and gardens, with a wonderful dispensation by nature that they should "neither lack a sufficient quantity of blood for absorption nor be overloaded at any time with excessive supply." The function of respiration was the introduction of the pneuma, the spirits which passed from the lungs to the heart through the pulmonary vessels.
But attempts to solve the problem were not long in coming. According to a very early tradition, of which the obscured traces remain in the synoptic gospels, Jesus received the pneuma at the time of his baptism, when the Holy Spirit, or visible manifestation of the essence of Jehovah, descended upon him and became incarnate in him.
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