Chapter 13 - Cosmic Spiritualism among the Pythagoreans, Stoics, Jews and Early Christians

Summary

This chapter traces a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology, covering the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE, the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE, the Jews writing in Alexandria in the first century BCE and the Christians of the first century CE. Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1-3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’.