Spirit or ghost understood in this way has its being in the possibility of both gentleness and destructiveness. Gentleness in no way dampens the ecstacy of the inflammatory, but holds it gathered in the peace of friendship. Destructiveness come from unbridled license, which consumes itself in its own revolt and thus is active evil. Evil is always the evil of a ghostly spirit. Evil and its malice is not of a sensuous, material nature. Nor is it purely "of the spirit." Evil is ghostly in that it is the revolt of a terror blazing away in blind delusion, which casts all things into unholy fragmentation and threatens to turn the calm, collected blossoming of gentleness to ashes.

P. 179

¶ 5:43 PM