The Eastern Patristic View of the Soul through the Eighth Century

Theological Letters

The following is a paper solicited by International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA) for their annual conference, held this year in Volos, Greece. This talk was one of three papers in a session on the soul, where I presented alongside Richard Swinburne. Because the following was written for a talk, not publication, it lacks appropriate citations. However, many of the points I discuss are fleshed out in my other publications, which include citations and quotations. I would point my readers especially to: “On Whether the Soul is Immortal According to the Eastern Church Fathers” and “Are Created Spirits Composed of Matter and Form?”

My title offers the rather ambitious promise of covering how the Eastern Church fathers, from the first through the eighth century, understand the soul. Titles are often more ambitious than papers, but I will do my best to make good on this promise. Given the allotted time, I cannot provide granular work of textual analysis. Instead, I offer a systematic overview of commitments ubiquitous in the Eastern fathers on the nature of the soul. So, with that, let’s jump in. 

1. What is the Soul? 

In the most basic sense, “soul” (psychē) is the life of a body, evident in the etymology of “ensoulment” (empsychos), which simply means to be alive. Thus, any living body has a soul—that is, life within it. This may come as a shock to the children of Modernity, who tend to think of the soul as synonymous with mind and thus as something unique to human beings. But amongst ancient writers generally, and the Eastern fathers specifically, humans are far from the only ensouled beings. The Eastern fathers speak about the soul of animals and the “vegetative soul” (phytikos psychē) of plants, and the Origenists even speculate—though their speculation is rejected by the Church—that planets too are ensouled, since they are moving bodies. 

The view recognizes that body and life are logically distinct. Were they not, lifeless body would be a contradiction in terms. While the point requires a distinction between the body and its life, it nonetheless leaves us with a host of other questions about the nature of soul. The two most obvious are: (1) Is the soul inherently immortal? (2) Is the soul inherently rational? Let’s begin with the latter.

Is the Soul Rational? This question goes to the common distinction between soul (psychē) and spirit (pneuma). The distinction has two bases. The first is that soul is the life of a body. Hence, bodiless beings, such as angels or God, are not souls but spirits. Second, and closely related, spirit indicates intelligence—or in the case of angels, beings of “pure intelligence.”

Now, confusion emerges, evident in contemporary scholarship, about these two terms when considering man. For here, we have both a living body and intelligence. Hence, the ancient language often oscillates between terms, speaking of either the soul of man or the spirit of man with no clear delineation—in Scripture and in Homeric literature, for example. The two most common scholarly reactions are to conclude either that soul and spirit are distinct things and man has both (tripartite anthropology) or that the terms are synonyms and any attempt to systematize the distinction is anachronistic. 

What we find in the Eastern fathers is neither. The language of these fathers certainly reflects the distinction between the rational and the irrational. When speaking of irrational animals and plants, no interchange of soul and spirit occurs. Likewise, when speaking about “pure intelligences,” such as angels, the consistent terminology is spirit. As for the interchange of terms with regard to man, what we find is a distinction between the mind of man and the life of man. However, the distinction is not one of substance, as if the human body possesses one thing called soul and a second called spirit. Instead, to quote John of Damascus, “[the soul] does not have a mind as something distinct from itself, but as its purest part.” Here, we see that intelligence is a godlike trait—the most central trait to man as the icon of God, which we will discuss below. And though not all souls have intelligence, the human soul has this as its purest part. The interchange of terms in the case of man, then, is not because the terms are without differentiation but because the soul of man is unique. It is the animating force of a body, making it a soul, but this type of soul bears intelligence—its “purest part”—which is otherwise found only in bodiless beings. So it is appropriately called spirit as well. 

Is the Soul Immortal? This question is more complex. The reason is that the term “immortal” (athanatos or aphthora) has a variety of meanings.¹ If, for example, we look at Plato’s (or, if you prefer, Socrates’) arguments for the immortality of the soul, his meaning is necessary existence, or aseity, to use the scholastic term. The conclusion of Plato’s affinity argument is not just that the soul survives departure from the body or that it is immune to death but that it must exist prior to entering the body. In other words, it neither comes to be nor ceases to be but always is. It’s no wonder, then, that later Platonists conclude that the soul is a divine ray of light in the house of the body. 

This meaning of immortality is consistently rejected by the Eastern fathers. Angels and human souls are often said to be immortal in some sense, but they are uniformly said to be created and to exist at the will of God. Hence, even if they never cease to be, they do so at God’s choosing. Even Origenism, with its doctrine of the pre-existent soul, affirms the creation of these souls and the free will of God in their creation, indicating that their existence is contingent, not necessary.

A softer meaning of “immortal” is “indissoluble.” This meaning admits the starting point of the affinity argument, namely, that reality is bifurcated between organic and inorganic realities. The organic is composed of parts that come together in a generative process and then erode and disperse in a process of corruption. Mathematical realities, by contrast, are inorganic, unchanging, and thus subject to neither organic generation nor dispersion. The feature of the affinity argument that the Eastern fathers do affirm is that soul (and spirit) sits on the inorganic side of this divide. Hence, the soul is indissoluble, immune to organic corruption because it is not an organism. The point may sound unextraordinary to the contemporary ear, but not all ancient writers presumed this.

Now, there are other types of immortality promised in the Christian gospel to which the soul can obtain. But let’s first discuss the mode of corruption to which the soul is subject.

2. On Spiritual Corruption. 

Organic corruption is not the only possible mode of corruption. Corruption (phthora) is any divergence from proper formation and teleology. While the soul is incorruptible in the organic sense, it is not incorruptible in the spiritual sense. Created spirits and rational souls are endowed with free self-determination and thus undergo development, moving toward or away from their proper formation, spiritually speaking. In fact, the Eastern fathers insist that rational creatures are self-determining of metaphysical necessity, precisely because moral properties require acts of reason and will and thus require the creature to participate in its moral formation.² Such is the basis for the Christian commitment that evil is not authored by God but by free creatures. Both the Fall of angels and of man are products of free choice, when uncorrupted beings chose to retreat from their proper end.

Corruption of this sort is not a distortion of organic material, like a detached retina in an eye, but a divergence from proper spiritual formation. Angels and humans are both made to ascend to and participate in God. But self-determination allows the creature to freely retreat to lower goods, becoming evil. The susceptibility to such corruption is what the Eastern fathers have in mind when they say we are “turnable” (treptos): We have the capacity to freely turn from God. Both spirits and rational souls are corruptible in this sense.

How this mode of corruption looks in the human soul, as contrasted with bodiless spirits, is notably different. Unsurprisingly, the difference concerns embodiment. In both cases, the root of spiritual corruption is the passions—the pre-volitional draw of a perceived good or repulsion by a perceived evil. In the case of disembodied spirits, the passions are, of course, intellectual, not bodily. In the case of the human soul, however, there is a merger of spirit and flesh. Hence, animal passions of the flesh assail the spirit. In short, for pure spirits, the passions are wholly intrinsic, while for the soul of man, the passions are both intrinsic (intellectual passion) and extrinsic (fleshly passions).

The body-soul relationship also plays a part in the ongoing effects of the corruption in the Fall. The Eastern fathers describe the natural relationship between the body and soul. They speak of the soul as the higher nature, bearing the image of God, and the body as the lower nature. These fathers take it to be prime facie that the higher should govern the lower, the rational governing the irrational. Keep in mind, the bodily passions are nothing but irrational animal perceptions of goods and evils, reflective of lower animal impulses of survival. But reason has the capacity to (a) assess whether that perception is accurate, (b) determine whether the embrace of a good or the rejection of an evil is in accord with the law of nature, and (c) introduce higher goods to which animals are oblivious. Yet, in the Fall, there is an inversion of this natural relationship. Rather than the spirit governing the flesh, the spirit is subjugated to the flesh, overrun and ruled by the fleshly passions that assail it. And it is this inversion of the proper order that the progeny of Adam are born into.

3. On Acquired Immortality and the Image of God

The effect of this inverted relationship between body and soul brings us to the types of immortality that the soul can acquire and the way  spiritual corruption hinders their acquisition. To explain, we begin with man as an icon of God.

This well-known doctrine is traceable to Genesis, where God sets out to create man in his own image and according to his likeness, only to create man in his image (not yet in his likeness). As noted, the Eastern fathers tend to locate the image of God in the soul and specifically its capacities of reason and freedom—though also noting its invisibility and material simplicity. Such invisibility and simplicity is common to animal and plant souls as well, but lacking reason, they also lack the image of God. The likeness of God, by contrast, concerns the active imitation of God. In this imitation, the moving image comes to bear active traits of mercy, love, justice, and more. 

Now, the significance of man as image-bearer brings us to the Eastern patristic view of image-archetype relations, relations that are central in the iconoclast controversy but play an important role in anthropology well before this.³ By way of background, Plato makes an interesting observation about images. First, he distinguishes insubstantial images, such as shadows, from substantial images, such as reflections. When considering the nature of a substantial image, Plato observes that images have the unique trait that they are essentially referential. This is the image of: name the archetype. Unlike a square, which can be defined wholly with references to its own properties, such as lines and sides, an image must point beyond itself to its archetype for definition. The implication is that images bear an essential connection with their archetype. 

This relational tether brings with it a natural susceptibility to the attributes of the archetype. Images often share the attributes of that which they image, be it shape, color, position, regality, sublimity, and so on. For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say that this sensibility about images is reflected in the Septuagint translation of the prohibition on idols.⁴ And we see it reflected in the Eastern patristic talk of man as an icon of God. Pervasive is their insistence that man, as icon, is made to ascend to his divine archetype, and such ascent has as its end that man bears the attributes of God. Amongst those attributes are immortality, incorruption, and unturnability. By this ascent to and participation in its archetype, the soul is able to acquire these modes of immortality that are otherwise alien to it and communicate such immortality to the lower nature, the flesh.

Here, I should offer an aside on the word “attribute.” In Western literature, divine attributes typically refer to words that are descriptive of the divine essence, captured in the omni’s (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.). In Eastern patristic literature, the divine attributes refer to the energies of God. Because this is not a talk on the essence-energies distinction, I will state the distinction only briefly.⁵ The essence of God refers to the divine nature as such, which is shared by the members of the Trinity and which is beyond human knowing. The divine energies, by contrast, are the free and substantial expressions of that nature. They are the “parts of God” or “things around God” or “God’s acts that precede creation.” And these energies are communicable to creatures, often illustrated by the way fire communicates its energies of heating and lighting to iron, which comes to glow and burn, bearing the energies of fire, while still remaining iron by nature. So, in the same way, no creature can bear the divine nature as such, becoming a fourth member of the Trinity. But a creature can bear in his person the divine energies, becoming a partaker of God. 

The significance of this doctrine here is that the Eastern fathers, like holy Scripture, identify immortality, incorruption, and unturnability as divine attributes or energies. Hence, these expressions of the divine nature are communicable to creatures. Notice that Christ offers us immortality and refers to it as the Life that is in the Father, which he gave to the Son in his generation, and which the Son offers to us in the gospel.⁶ Notice also that this doctrine is the only way to make sense of the NT talk of resurrection, which, according to St. Paul, is the putting off of corruption for incorruption.⁷ How is this accomplished? According to St. Peter, we escape corruption by partaking of the divine nature.⁸ In short, the incorruption put on in the resurrection is God’s own.

Now, here we see a second critical difference between Eastern and Western theology. In the West, there is a so-called “nature-grace divide.” Beatitude is beyond the natural capacities of man. Grace is required to open the door to beatitude. Even Adam only had such capacity because of “original righteousness,” a pre-Fall form of grace. In the Fall, grace is forfeit and the giving of fresh grace is required to open the door to salvific action. Yet, this giving is wholly arbitrary in the sense that man cannot demand it, he has no natural access to it, and God has no obligation to give it. 

In the Eastern fathers, by contrast, we find something quite different. The soul, as an icon of God, has a natural and inseverable connection to its divine archetype. This connection is what makes the soul susceptible to divine attributes, these energies being what is meant by the word grace. Thus, while it is true that the divine energies are above nature, the soul’s access to these supernatural graces is perfectly natural. And the Fall does not change this. The soul remains an image of God, tethered to its archetype.

The point is reflected in the way the Eastern fathers speak about the corruption of the Fall. St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the image of God as that lost coin that is buried under the passions within the house of man that Christ comes to recover. St. Antony speaks of the natural capacity of the soul to deify, but the soul, being twisted, is incapable of doing so. But if untwisted, it again does what it is made to do. In other words, the tether to the archetype remains. For the soul, as image, is essentially tied to its divine archetype. But the subjection of the higher nature to the lower nature cripples the soul’s capacity to ascend to its archetype by imitation. 

4. Metaphysical Anthropology

I want to discuss how this view of the soul and its corruption informs the Eastern patristic understanding of the healing offered by Christianity and its gospel. But first, we should consider some further commitments in Eastern patristic anthropology.

The first commitment concerns hylomorphism. For those unfamiliar with this term, it suggests that any created substance is composed of matter (hylē) and form (morphē).⁹ In this theory, “matter” refers, not to atoms or elements, but to a substratum of potential. We might think of it like a shapeless bit of fabric that can receive any number of shapes—receiving sphericality, for example, by being draped around a ball. Form, by contrast, refers to generic properties that appear in multiple things, such as bipedal, four-sided, red, or spherical. Plato famously speculated that the Forms comprise a second world of ideal archetypes of which our material world is a copy. Aristotle, by contrast, suggests that form is locally present in things. More specifically, form manifests within matter, moving material potential into concrete reality. To again use our fabric-ball analogy, if the fabric represents matter, the ball represents the form that communicates sphericality to it.

The Eastern patristic commitment to hylomorphism becomes evident in the Arian dispute, where it proves, not only to be assumed, but takes on confessional significance. In this dispute, Arius famously suggests that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist and then God made him. Athanasius contested the point, and many of his central arguments presume hylomorphic physics. Specifically, Athanasius argues that if the Son of God was made, then he moved from non-being into being. Non-being (mē on) in this context refers to matter in the Aristotelian sense. The movement Athanasius describes is the shift from potential to actual, which occurs as form enters matter. This reading is confirmed by Arius himself, who feels compelled to state in his defense that he does not believe the Son of God receives existence from matter.

This polemic is not unique to Athanasius. It echoes in the other pro-Nicenes, such as Alexander of Alexandria, and ultimately in the anathemas of the Council of Nicea itself. So it is no exaggeration to say that this metaphysic took on confessional significance. And so, it is equally no surprise to find that it persists beyond Nicea, echoing in the Cappadocians, Maximos, John of Damascus, et al. 

Now, the relevance to Eastern patristic anthropology is twofold. First, on this metaphysic, every creature is hylomorphic. Keep in mind Athanasius’ case: To be created is to move from non-being into being, or from mere potential to concrete reality. Because matter is the principle of potential, this means that every creature consists of a substratum of potential and the concrete properties manifest within it. In short, every creature is hylomorphic. 

By way of implication, then, every creature is material in some sense. This may sound strange, given that the Eastern fathers speak of the soul and angels as immaterial. However, equally common is the Eastern patristic caveat that “immaterial,” when used of creatures, is only a relative term. To quote John of Damascus, “in comparison with God, who alone is incorporeal, everything proves to be gross [pakhu] and material [hylikon].” Applied to the soul, then, the Eastern patristic commitment is that the soul is not only created but also material. And this materiality is what underwrites its capacity for change for either better or worse.

Now, those familiar with Aristotle are likely familiar with his notion that the soul is not itself a matter-form composite. Rather, the soul is the form and the body is the material recipient. Such a view is rejected by the Eastern fathers on the basis of the intermediate state. Because the soul leaves the body and subsists for a time on its own, they conclude the soul is its own hylomorphic substance, distinct from the body. In a word, they are substance dualists. And these two substances are conjoined.¹⁰

The second point concerns form. The Eastern fathers are realists. They do not believe the abstraction of common properties is an invention of mind. Rather, the mind abstracts these properties and identifies them as common because they are, in reality, common—a single form manifest in several subjects. We see this, for example, in Gregory of Nyssa’s On “Not Three Gods,” where his reply to whether Paul, Timothy, and Silvanus are three humans is that they are not. They are one human. For human refers to the nature, which is one, though had by several subjects.¹¹

The same is true for soul. The nature of soul is one. That nature is imminently present in my soul as well as yours. We are distinct subjects (hypostases), and for that reason, how we use the nature we have is idiosyncratic. But the nature itself is one and common to all in our species. 

5. On the Healing of Soul

This last point is particularly important to the nature of redemption, which is our final topic. I spoke about the distortion of our nature in the Fall and the condition we inherit as a result, a condition that cripples the natural ability of the soul to deify. The Eastern patristic understanding of the gospel brings together this view of corruption with the commitment to common natures. 

In the Incarnation, the Son of God takes on our nature. Keep in mind here what was said above about common natures. What Christ takes on is the nature that is in you and me, the nature that has been distorted by the Fall. Also keep in mind what was said by Gregory of Nyssa about the image as the lost coin in the house of humanity. That image, which has the capacity to deify, is buried beneath the passions, due to the inversion of our nature, and that capacity is thus crippled. How, then, does Christ heal that nature? In short, he heals it from within, again subjugating the passions to the spirit and raising the spirit back to its divine archetype. By joining our human nature with his divine nature in his person, Christ is able to reorder human nature, undoing the inversion, while also conjoining the unearthed icon with the divine energies that he bears in himself.

It is this reordering of human nature that the Christian participates in by both union and participation: Union through the sacramental and liturgical life and imitation in the life of dying and rising daily through asceticism and obedience. 

I will close with one final point about the healing of the soul and its relationship to death. I discussed above that one effect of corruption is the inversion of the relationship between the spirit and the flesh, which results in the fleshly passions having an unnatural sway over the soul. The Eastern fathers speak about the death that results from corruption in two ways: (1) as a natural consequence and (2) as a gift for the rehabilitation of the soul. The former, we have already seen: The soul, as image-bearer, is the part of man that has a natural capacity to acquire divine immortality, incorruption, and unturnability, but being subjugated to the passions, it can no longer raise us up to God and acquire these. Hence, the natural mortality of flesh follows.¹²

As for death as a gift, we see this in the Eastern patristic talk of “unmaking” man for the sake of his remaking. Basil of Caesarea and his brother Gregory both use a potter analogy to describe the inverted nature. The analogy presents man as a vessel made from two different substances, indicative of their substance dualism. The question is what is the potter to do if these substances mingle together in some unintended way? They answer that to fire the vessel is to make the imperfection permanent. What is required is to separate the two substances and begin again.

Here is illustrated the dissolution of the body—sending it to dust—and the separation of the soul from it. This separation has as its aim redemption, the unmaking of the distorted vessel in order that it might be remade in the resurrection from the dead, where the body and soul are again united and properly ordered, the flesh governed by the spirit and the spirit participating in its divine archetype, raising the whole nature up to immortality, incorruption, and unturnability. 

The Eastern fathers who speak about this unmaking for the sake of remaking also see in this separation of soul from body a form of detoxification. The soul, having been subject to fleshly passions, has been infected by them. But in being separated from the body, the soul can no longer satisfy those passions. Hence, lingering attachments are purged in this separation in the final healing of the soul in preparation for the complete healing of the person in the resurrection from the dead, a healing first glimpsed in full in the Resurrected Jesus Christ. 

1. For a full treatment of the various meanings of “immortal” and the Eastern patristic understanding of which meanings are applicable to the soul, see my article: “On Whether the Soul is Immortal According to the Eastern Church Fathers.”

2. I flesh out this point more fully in my article: “Created Corruptible, Raised Incorruptible: The Significance of Hylomorphic Creationism to the Free Will Defense.”

3. I flesh out more fully the image-archetype distinction in my article: “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers.”

4. I discuss the continuity between this insight and the LXX prohibition on idols in my articles: “John of Damascus and His Defense of Icons” and “John of Damascus.”

5. A more thorough explanation of the essence-energies distinction appears in my article: “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers.”

6. John 6:25-59.

7. 1 Corinthians 15:53-55.

8. 2 Peter 1:4.

9. I explain realism, hylomorphic metaphysics, and the Eastern patristic use of hylomorphism in my article: “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers.”

10. I explore at length the various models of body-soul dualism in the history of Christianity, East and West, including this Aristotelian theory, in my article: “Are Created Spirits Composed of Matter and Form?”

11. The details of the Eastern patristic model of realism is thoroughly fleshed out in my article: “The Metaphysical Idealism of the Eastern Church Fathers.”

12. This particular point concerning the dissolution of the body I explore in my article “On Whether the Soul is Immortal According to the Eastern Church Fathers”, but it also closely relates to the Eastern patristic doctrine of Hades and Christ’s descent thereto, which I explore in my substack letter: “Hell, Hades, and Christ’s Descent (Part 1).”