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.In his monograph, 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 In his first chapter 'Man and the Material World,' he describes the devaluation of the universe in the early Christian centuries as progressive withdrawal of divinity from the material world and the corresponding devaluation of ordinary human experience. He describes the characteristic attitudes that developed in this era towards the world and the place of man within it as a product of a global sense of anxiety, which incited man to turn his back on the here and now -the visible cosmos -in favor of 'mystical experiences' of the soul.3 This seems to 1 I am thankful to Brain Stock, Inbar Graiver and Orna Harari for reading this article and for their invaluable comments.2 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some aspects of religious experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 3 We use here Dodds' terminology. Note that we shall avoid the use of 'mystical' and 'mysticism,' in order not to differentiate between the religious, philosophical and psychological aspects of the 'experiences' attributed to the psuchē. See one of the best introductions to the phenomenology of mysticism: M. de Certeau, "Mysticism," trans. Marsanne Brammer, Diacritics 22/2 (1992) pp. 11-25.
The article examines the new psychological language that developed in late antiquity to formulate a personal relationship with the one God. This language used the Greek term for the soul, the psuche (Latin anima), and defined it as the relational faculty of the human mind. The perception of the human mind as relational became instrumental to formulate the experience of conversion, that is, a mental and emotional process of self-transformation, psychological in the modern sense of the term. The article analyzes the psychological perspective of the ancient authors who developed the idea of the relational faculty to connect to God by using modern theories that perceive the human mind as relationally configured. In order to analyze ancient and modern writers together, the article develops a new methodological approach to move in between ancient and modern writings without falling into the pit of anachronism. This approach enables the author to define a common theoretical field for historical analysis and psychoanalysis, and to use the historical evidence in order to evaluate and challenge the modern psychoanalytic prism. To bridge between the two disciplines, the present article uses anthropology. Thanks to its psychological aspect, anthropology of religion validates the two-way relationship between history and psychoanalysis. Anthropological field research on the beliefs in tree spirits conducted by the author in an animistic environment has revealed a relational psychological language in the core of the animistic belief, and provides the missing link to connect history and psychoanalysis.
In 1961, an expedition of the Israel Exploration Society, led by Yigal Yadin, discovered in the cave known as “The Cave of the Letters” in Nahal Hever in the Judaean desert, a leather pouch containing thirty‐five juridical documents which belonged to a Jewish woman named Babatha from the period just prior to the Bar Kokhba revolt.
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