Abstract
The religious, theological and philosophical discourse in Late Antiquity concerning the human soul, the Greek psuchē , reveals a sophisticated and complex psychological language that was aimed at conceptualizing and articulating the act of conversion. The analysis of Gnostic, Orthodox Christian, and Neoplatonic writings in relation to the psuchē shows the cardinal role that this term played in formulating individual processes of mental transformation. Attributing active agency, mutability and relational aspect to the individual psuchē turned it into a unique conceptual device, necessary to define anew the human condition.
Highlights
Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some aspects of religious experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, written fifty years ago, Eric Robertson Dodds analyzes the different developments in thought in the second and third centuries AD as a general intellectual reaction to changes in the Roman world.[2]
Dodds continues to look for what he calls a mystical philosophical discourse that provided a psychological reply to the questions of this ‘age of anxiety,’ and finds it in the two great thinkers of the third century: Plotinus and Origen.[7]
The soul, Tertullian explains, is in constant movement thanks to its immortality and divinity. He goes on to equate the soul’s main function in sleep to a gladiator’s motions without his weapons, when his actions bear no result.[50]. This power of the soul, “a deprivation of the activity of the senses,” is what “we call ecstasy... [creating here a Latin term – ecstasis – by transliterating the Greek word ekstasis] which is an image of madness (Latin: amentiae instar).”[51]. Tertullian continues to develop this idea of a state of the soul – amentia – which instead of ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’ we propose to translate as a-mentia – ‘un-mindedness,’ i.e. the soul separated from the mind, its mental instrument
Summary
‘mystical’) experience, we need first to understand it in philosophical terms, and to note the major difference between Plotinus’ means of self-transformation and the ekstasis of the psuchē as it was defined by early Christian thinkers.[65] This difference was embodied in the place that Plotinus attributed in his model to the mind.
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