O Lord Almighty, God of Israel, the soul in anguish the troubled spirit, cries to you.
All Commentaries on Baruch 3:1 Go To Baruch 3
Athanasius the Apostolic
AD 373
You might have known, by consulting with learned persons, that there are different meanings of the word spirit. The Scripture, in fact, also speaks of the “spirit of man [a person],” as David sings, “I spoke with my heart by night, and my spirit was afflicted.” And Baruch prays, saying, “An anguished soul and a saddened spirit raises its cry to you.” And in the canticle of the three young men, “Spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord.” For his part, the apostle writes, “The Spirit attests to our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, we are also heirs.” And, “No one knows what is in a person except the spirit of the person that is within him.” Moreover, in the letter to the Thessalonians he prays “that your whole spirit, soul and body would be kept irreproachable at the coming of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Winds are also called “spirit,” as for example in Genesis, “And God made a spirit sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided.” And in the book of Jonah, “the Lord brought a great spirit over the sea and made a great tempest in the sea, so that the ship was in danger of breaking up.” Also in Psalm 106 it is written, “He spoke, and a hurricane spirit was stirred up over the waves.” And in Psalm 148, “Praise the Lord from the earth, fish of the sea and the abyss, fire, hail, snow, ice and tempest spirit, that carry out his word.” And in Ezekiel, in the lamentation over Tyre, “Your oarsmen brought you to the heart of the sea, into deep waters. The spirit of the east smashed you.” If you were also to read the sacred Scriptures, you would find that the meaning itself of the divine words is also called “spirit,” as when Paul writes, “He has made us fit to be ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the spirit: the letter in fact kills, but the spirit gives life.” “Letter” is that by which an expression is materially composed, but the spiritual meaning contained in it is called “spirit.”
