University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Psukhai That Matter: The Psukhē in and Behind Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus Phillip Jay Webster University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Webster, Phillip Jay, "Psukhai That Matter: The Psukhē in and Behind Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2088. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2088 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2088 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Psukhai That Matter: The Psukhē in and Behind Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus Abstract This dissertation aims to investigate the ideology and mechanics of the ancient soul’s materiality as witnessed in Clement of Alexandria’s late second- or early third-century work, the Paedagogus. I focus on four ways in which Clement refers to the soul: (1) as an entity in need of punishment and healing, (2) as vulnerable to substances and the activities of the body, (3) as made visible through the body’s appearance, and (4) as an internal moral-core. Through the lens of the Paedagogus, this dissertation introduces recent theoretical work on “materiality” and “the body,” especially as developed in gender studies, into the broad scholarly conversation about the ancient soul. In the process, it shows how Clement uses the interactions between the ancient soul and the ancient body in his attempt to produce and police Christian subjects.