Inbar Graiver: The Late Antique Roots of Introspection: Producing and Ordering Psychological Knowledge in Monastic Communities

The religious and cultural transformations of late antiquity gave rise to a new concept of the self. In particular, new theological concerns in Christianity culminated with the emergence of an increased interest in the inner world of the individual alongwith new investigative methods. These new lines of psychological investigation are at the center of this paper. In particular, it focuses on introspective methods for producing psychological knowledge which emerged in the Eastern monastic tradition of late antiquity. The introduction of introspective methods of data production, I suggest, was of central importance in the emergence of the theistic psychology of the monastic movement.Introspection was also of central importance in the emergence of modern psychology in the nineteenth century. Whereas modern historians of psychology have argued that introspection is a historically recent invention, this paper provides evidence suggesting that the Desert Fathers and their followers, especially Evagrius Ponticus, already employed introspection as a method for investigating the human mind. Yet, rather than arguing for a simple continuity between late antique and modern introspective procedures, a comparison between early monastic interpretations of evidence derived from introspection and those of the founders of the modern psychology reveals profound differences in the evaluation of introspective data. A juxtaposition of these alternative conceptualizations of psychological knowledge raises epistemological questions concerning the nature of such knowledge and the extent to which it is culturally constructed, which the second part of the paper addresses.

Samuel Kaldas: Flight of the Living Dead: Asceticism as Living Death in the Desert Fathers and Late Platonists

In late antiquity, some Desert Fathers and late Platonists professed a vehement desire to be dead. This was because they both considered ordinary human life — life in a body filled with passions — an unnatural condition which could only be escaped by death. But neither community advocated suicide. Instead, they both strove to approximate the state of being dead as far possible through ascetic living: Platonists fasted, abstained from sex and fled from political society; not to be outdone, the Desert Fathers adopted a variety of ascetic practices that took literal corpses as models for imitation (for instance, taking up residence in abandoned tombs or taking vows of silence). In this way, without committing the sin of suicide, they could begin to enjoy the blessed release from the tyranny of the passions which they hoped bodily death would eventually bring them.This paper compares the 'philosophies of death' that underlie the ascetic practices of the late Platonists and Desert Fathers, particularly with regard to their differing attitudes about the body. To wit, while the Platonists viewed the body itself as an evil: living death was a way of preparing the soul to make a permanent exit from its bodily prison. But Desert Fathers (constrained by the doctrines of the incarnation and general resurrection) viewed their living death as a participation in Christ's death, and a means of cleansing the body from its fallen condition and preparing it for resurrection.