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. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Religious Studies First Advisor Annette Y. Reed Keywords body, Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, soul Subject Categories Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity | Religion This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2088 PSUKHAI THAT MATTER: THE PSUKHĒ IN AND BEHIND CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA’S PAEDAGOGUS Phillip J. Webster A DISSERTATION in Religious Studies Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ Annette Y. Reed Associate Professor, Religious Studies Graduate Group Chairperson ______________________ Annette Y. Reed Associate Professor, Religious Studies Dissertation Committee Ralph M. Rosen Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, Classical Studies, The University of Pennsylvania Denise K. Buell Dean of Faculty and Cluett Professor of Religion, Department of Religion, Williams College PSUKHAI THAT MATTER: THE PSUKHĒ IN AND BEHIND CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA’S PAEDAGOGUS COPYRIGHT 2016 Phillip J. Webster This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ In memory of Donna For Heather and Juniper iii Acknowledgments I owe a debt to Dr. Annette Yoshiko Reed that I will never be able to repay. She has been tirelessly available, a constant source of inspiration, an advocate, and a tremendously insightful reader. She has benefitted me as a scholar and improved this dissertation far beyond what I or it deserve. Her acumen and breadth of learning have challenged me to think and write with a wider mind. Whatever faults and shortcomings lie in this dissertation, they remain in spite of her best efforts to sharpen my thought and frames of reference. I am enormously grateful to her. I also deeply appreciated for my committee members, Dr. Denise Kimber Buell and Dr. Ralph Rosen. I count myself as particularly lucky to have Dr. Buell, who has written so brilliantly on Clement, give such generous feedback on my project. I am especially appreciative of how she has pushed me to engage with new materialist perspectives in a richer manner than I had been. I hope to more fully incorporate her advice into my future work. Dr. Rosen has been especially generous with his time. I owe him a debt particularly for helping me learn about ancient Greek medicine, especially Galen. I thank both of them for their time, their comments, and the ensuing conversations I have had with each of them. The Department of Religious Studies at Penn has been a truly wonderful place to study, and I want to thank each of the faculty members there as well as my fellow graduate students for creating such a stimulating to study. I also want to thank Steve Weitzman and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies for offering me such a wonderful space to finish the dissertation. The 2015-16 fellows at the Katz Center have challenged me through our conversation and their papers. I will miss all of them dearly. I also want to thank the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, especially Zachary Braiterman, Virginia Burrus, and M. Gail Hamner, for welcoming me as an unofficial part of their community during my sojourn in Syracuse. I also owe thanks to the friendly, welcoming, and invigorating LARCeNY group for providing me with a second intellectual home while I stayed in central New York. My friends and family have provided me with amazing support, and I truly could not have finished without them. Jae Han has probably read more drafts of this dissertation than anyone else. I thank him for his incredibly helpful comments, feedback, and encouragement. Greg Sevik also read previous drafts of various chapters, and I thank him not only for his insights, but also for providing such intellectual stimulation throughout our friendship. I miss our summer reading “group.” Todd Berzon has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. I owe him more than he knows. Lily Vuong has also helped more than she knows, and I thank her for her timely encouragement and support. Herbie Miller has been there from the beginning of my academic journey, and I thank him for the many conversations along the way. Finally, my family also deserves mention. My father has always been a reader, and I probably owe him my life-long love affair with books. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, who passed away just before I began it, to my wife, Heather, who has supported iv me throughout the process, and to my daughter, who has lived out the first few months of her life with her daddy furiously typing away, trying to finish his dissertation. Heather has been such a wonderful source of joy, encouragement, and love as I read and wrote. She tells me that I mentioned this research topic on our first date, and I know she is eager for me to have a longer relationship with her than I have had with this project—and I am excited for that too. v ABSTRACT PSUKHAI THAT MATTER: THE PSUKHĒ IN AND BEHIND CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA’S PAEDAGOGUS Phillip J. Webster Annette Yoshiko Reed 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. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................................. IX INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1 Clement of Alexandria and the Paedagogus .......................................................................................... 5 The Material Soul ............................................................................................................................... 18 Race, the Sexed Body, and the Ancient Soul ....................................................................................... 26 Chapter Summary .............................................................................................................................. 33 Conclusion: A Study of the Psukhē, not the Soul ................................................................................ 34 CHAPTER 1 – HEAL AND PUNISH THE PSUKHĒ ................................................... 38 The Sick Psukhē .................................................................................................................................. 40 The Psukhē: Not an Empty Category .................................................................................................. 53 The Psukhē’s Power as an Object, or Morals and Matter .................................................................. 57 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 72 CHAPTER 2 – A PART OF THE BODY ........................................................................