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tendency of Christ’s teaching was to centre all interest in the

spiritual side of man’s nature; the salvation or loss of the soul is

the great issue of existence. The Gospel language is popular, not

technical. Psyche and pneuma are used indifferently either for the

principle of natural life or for spirit in the strict sense. Body

and soul are recognized as a dualism and their values contrasted:

“Fear ye not them that kill the body . . . but rather fear him that

can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

In St. Paul we find a more technical phraseology employed with great

consistency. Psyche is now appropriated to the purely natural life;

pneuma to the life of supernatural religion, the principle of which

is the Holy Spirit, dwelling and operating in the heart. The

opposition of flesh and spirit is accentuated afresh (Romans 1:18,

etc.). This Pauline system, presented to a world already

prepossessed in favour of a quasi-Platonic Dualism, occasioned one

of the earliest widespread forms of error among Christian writers —

the doctrine of the Trichotomy. According to this, man, perfect man

(teleios) consists of three parts: body, soul, spirit (soma, psyche,

pneuma). Body and soul come by natural generation; spirit is given

to the regenerate Christian alone. Thus, the “newness of life”, of

which St. Paul speaks, was conceived by some as a superadded entity,

a kind of oversoul sublimating the “natural man” into a higher

species. This doctrine was variously distorted in the different

Gnostic systems. The Gnostics divided man into three classes:

pneumatici or spiritual,

psychici or animal,

choici or earthy.

To each class they ascribed a different origin and destiny. The

spiritual were of the seed of Achemoth, and were destined to return

in time whence they had sprung — namely, into the pleroma. Even in

this life they are exempted from the possibility of a fall from

their high calling; they therefore stand in no need of good works,

and have nothing to fear from the contaminations of the world and

the flesh. This class consists of course of the Gnostics themselves.

The psychici are in a lower position: they have capacities for

spiritual life which they must cultivate by good works. They stand

in a middle place, and may either rise to the spiritual or sink to

the hylic level. In this category stands the Christian Church at

large. Lastly, the earthy souls are a mere material emanation,

destined to perish: the matter of which they are composed being

incapable of salvation (me gar einai ten hylen dektiken soterias).

This class contains the multitudes of the merely natural man.

Two features claim attention in this the earliest essay towards a

complete anthropology within the Christian Church:

an extreme spirituality is attributed to “the perfect”;

immortality is conditional for the second class of souls, not an

intrinsic attribute of all souls.

It is probable that originally the terms pneumatici, psychici, and

choici denoted at first elements which were observed to exist in all

souls, and that it was only by an afterthought that they were

employed, according to the respective predominance of these elements

in different cases, to represent supposed real classes of men. The

doctrine of the four temperaments and the Stoic ideal of the Wise

Man afford a parallel for the personification of abstract qualities.

The true genius of Christianity, expressed by the Fathers of the

early centuries, rejected Gnosticism. The ascription to a creature

of an absolutely spiritual nature, and the claim to endless

existence asserted as a strictly de jure privilege in the case of

the “perfect”, seemed to them an encroachment on the incommunicable

attributes of God. The theory of Emanation too was seen to be a

derogation from the dignity of the Divine nature For this reason,

St. Justin, supposing that the doctrine of natural immortality

logically implies eternal existence, rejects it, making this

attribute (like Plato in the “Timaeus”) dependent on the free will

of God; at the same time he plainly asserts the de facto immortality

of every human soul. The doctrine of conservation, as the necessary

complement of creation, was not yet elaborated. Even in Scholastic

philosophy, which asserts natural immortality, the abstract

possibility of annihilation through an act of God’s absolute power

is also admitted. Similarly, Tatian denies the simplicity of the

soul, claiming that absolute simplicity belongs to God alone. All

other beings, he held, are composed of matter and spirit. Here again

it would be rash to urge a charge of Materialism. Many of these

writers failed to distinguish between corporeity in strict essence

and corporeity as a necessary or natural concomitant. Thus the soul

may itself be incorporeal and yet require a body as a condition of

its existence. In this sense St. Irenaeus attributes a certain

“corporeal character” to the soul; he represents it as possessing

the form of its body, as water possesses the form of its containing

vessel. At the same time, he teaches fairly explicitly the

incorporeal nature of the soul. He also sometimes uses what seems to

be the language of the Trichotomists, as when he says that in the

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