Pneuma
Pneuma (πνεῦμα) is an ancient Greek word for "breath", and in a religious context for "spirit" or "soul".[1][2] It has various technical meanings for medical writers and philosophers of classical antiquity, particularly in regard to physiology, and is also used in Greek translations of ruach רוח in the Hebrew Bible, and in the Greek New Testament.
This article is about the philosophical concept. For other uses, see Pneuma (disambiguation).Presocratics[edit]
Pneuma, "air in motion, breath, wind", is equivalent in the material monism of Anaximenes to aer (ἀήρ, "air") as the element from which all else originated. This usage is the earliest extant occurrence of the term in philosophy.[4] A quotation from Anaximenes observes that "just as our soul (psyche), being air (aer), holds us together, so do breath (pneuma) and air (aer) encompass the whole world." In this early usage, aer and pneuma are synonymous.[5]
In Stoic philosophy, pneuma is the concept of the "breath of life," a mixture of the elements air (in motion) and fire (as warmth).[6] For the Stoics, pneuma is the active, generative principle that organizes both the individual and the cosmos.[7] In its highest form, pneuma constitutes the human soul (psychê), which is a fragment of the pneuma that is the soul of the Deity. As a force that structures matter, it exists even in inanimate objects.[8] In the foreword to his 1964 translation of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Maxwell Staniforth writes:
In the Stoic universe, everything consists of matter and pneuma. There are three grades or kinds of pneuma, depending on their proportion of fire and air.
A fourth grade of pneuma may also be distinguished. This is the rational soul (logica psychê) of the mature human being, which grants the power of judgment.[13]
In Stoic cosmology, the cosmos is a whole and single entity, a living thing with a soul of its own. [14] Everything that exists depends on two first principles which can be neither created nor destroyed: matter, which is passive and inert, and the logos, or divine reason, which is active and organizing.[15] The 3rd-century BC Stoic Chrysippus regarded pneuma as the vehicle of logos in structuring matter, both in animals and in the physical world.[16] This divine pneuma that is the soul of the cosmos supplies the pneuma in its varying grades for everything in the world, [17] a spherical continuum of matter held together by the orderly power of Zeus through the causality of the pneuma that pervades it.
Pneuma in its purest form can thus be difficult to distinguish from logos or the "constructive fire" (pur technikon)[18] that drives the cyclical generation and destruction of the Stoic cosmos. When a cycle reaches its end in conflagration (ekpyrôsis), the cosmos becomes pure pneuma from which it regenerates itself.[19]
