Fire and Spirit by Eberhard Arnold, Perfect | Indigo Chapters

Lightning and forest fires could strike terror in primitive humans, yet they also cherished fire as a life-giving gift from the gods. Eberhard Arnold surveys the symbolism of light and fire in the Bible, literature, and history to illuminate our love/fear relationship with God. The Holy Spirit, like fire, is a two-edged sword: it brings the blazing wrath of God's judgment, consuming all that is dead and cold in us, but also the radiant warmth of his love, mercy, and redemption. ThoughInner Landwas not explicitly critical of the Nazi regime, it nevertheless attacked the spirits that animated German society at the time: racism and bigotry, nationalistic fervor, mass hysteria, and materialism. The chapter "Light and Fire," in particular, was a deliberate public statement at a decisive moment of Germany's history. Eberhard Arnold sent Hitler a copy on November 9, 1933. A week later the Gestapo raided the community and ransacked the author's study. After this first raid, Eberhard Arnold asked two friends to pack the already printed signatures ofInner Landin watertight metal boxes and bury them at night for safekeeping. They later dug upInner Landand smuggled it out of the country, publishing it in Lichtenstein after Eberhard Arnold's death. The fourth volume of five inInner Land, Fire and Spiritcontains two chapters, "Light and Fire" and "The Holy Spirit."AboutInnerland:It is hard to exaggerate the significance ofInnerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life - from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the titleWar: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life. Packed in metal boxes and buried at night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author's study a year before his death (and again a year after it),Innerlandwas not openly critical of Hitler's regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this senseInnerlandstands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author's. At a glance, the focus ofInnerlandseems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes inThe Inner Life:"These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world." | Fire and Spirit by Eberhard Arnold, Perfect | Indigo Chapters