The aim of this paper is to reassess a major issue related to Plato’s theory of the immortality of the soul, namely whether for a soul being immortal has to meant in the sense of ‘personal immortality’ (i.e., a person’s soul remains this person’s soul after that person’s death), ‘individual immortality’ (i.e., there is a plurality of individual immortal souls), or ‘cosmic immortality’ (i.e., only a cosmic psychic principle is immortal). More specifically, the paper shows that the first option is untenable from both philosophical and textual perspectives and that the second one is not only the most supported by textual evidence but also the most profitable from a philosophical point of view, whereas the first is introduced for pedagogical purposes, that is, as a noble lie.

Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato’s Sophist centers on the “greatest kinds”: Being, Motion, Rest, Identity, and Difference. Within his metaphysics of Intellect and intelligible Being, these kinds play a privileged role in expressing the unity of subject and object characteristic of the second hypostasis. This chapter examines Plotinus’ exegesis of the greatest kinds in On the Genera of Being (Enneads VI 1–3), focusing especially on VI 2, where the Platonic kinds are established as intelligible genera. Yet the entire tripartite treatise may be read as an interpretation of the ontological section of the Sophist. The critiques of Aristotelian and Stoic categories in VI 1 develop Plato’s rejection of pluralists and monists, while the principle that Being is both one and many reflects Plato’s search for an ontology avoiding both extremes. Plotinus’ derivation of the genera from the life and thought of Intellect, and his view of them as structural moments of self-thinking activity, rests on the claim that ‘Being in the full sense’ must possess life and thought. This principle underlies both Plotinus’ reading of the Sophist and his broader interpretation of Platonic metaphysics.

This chapter examines how Plutarch, in the De E apud Delphos, integrates the Sophist’s ontological distinction between true being and appearances with the Timaeus’ cosmology. It argues Plutarch that uses the Timaeus to answer the Sophist’s unresolved question about the ontological status of images, identifying the Sophist’s ‘that which perfectly is’ with the Demiurge. Thus, the dialogues are mutually illuminating and a genuine Platonic doctrine of the causes must take into account both.

This chapter reassesses the evidence for connecting Xenocrates’ account of the World-Soul with the Greatest Kinds of the Sophist. It argues there are no solid grounds to attribute this exegetical strategy to Xenocrates, countering a tradition initiated by Plutarch. The findings support the view that the Early Academy primarily employed the Sophist for debates on classification, division, and genus–species relations, not in other contexts, including cosmological.

In this concluding chapter, I provide an outline of the Proclan system drawn exclusively from his personal works. I then proceed to compare it to the philosophical system found in Plato’s dialogues along with the testimony regarding it in the Platonic tradition. I examine the two systems under the rubrics: One, Intellect, and Soul. I conclude by arguing that, while Proclus has elevated theology to a place beyond that which Plato himself endorses, nevertheless Proclus emerges as a highly accurate and philosophically sophisticated exegete of Plato and that for the most part, Plato and Proclus stand or fall together philosophically. In the notional Triad: Plato, Platonism, and Proclus, the “middle term” does unite the two “extremes,” even if the logos of each of these is different.

What did it mean to be human in the Byzantine church? How was humanity conceived theologically? What were the attributes that comprised the human person? This chapter offers an introduction to anthropological understandings of Byzantine theology. Drawing on major points of consensus across various theologians, genres and liturgical contexts, I show that humanity was understood primarily in light of its divinised potential. Although terminology and understandings of the human body and faculties might differ across various theologians, early and medieval Orthodox thinkers agreed upon the divine origin and end of humanity. From humanity’s creation in the divine image to its potential transcendence in divine communion, humanity in all its diverse expressions was understood as having its fullest expression in God.

This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

This chapter departs from many typical readings of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which treat that novel’s spiritual and numinous presences, practices, and powers as fantastical or magical rather than real and efficacious. Drawing on Díaz’s own statements, I show how the novel insists on the reality of supernatural forces and on how practices of prayer and the intervention of powerful spiritual forces, such as the Mongoose, can lead to resilience and survival amid the uncertainties and traumas of Caribbean dictatorship and migration to America. Díaz’s sense of cosmic vision in the novel, an insistence that there is spiritual purpose and power at work in the cosmos, shows how syncretic religious formations in the Caribbean can empower a radical hope in the face of the seemingly traumatic and impossible.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s interviews and archives to show how she is concerned to explore in her late fiction and poetry the idea of the soul as “the better story” about human and nonhuman animal life. I show how Atwood critiques not only Christian Nationalism but also, in Oryx and Crake, a materialist understanding of life. As a response to each of these extremes, Atwood turns to the soul, particularly in The Testaments and in Dearly, showing how that idea and the experienced presence of the souls of the dead can motivate endurance and hope in the face of oppressive formations of Christianity and a materialist sense of nothingness after death. Drawing on Atwood’s drafts of The Testaments, I trace how the novel became more spiritually serious as it developed and how the spiritual poetry of Dearly works together with scenes of spiritual support in Atwood’s novel.

Rock music is identified with postwar affluent youth subculture’s revolt against politics, consumerism, and social rules. The 1950s emergence of rock ’n’ roll was initially a celebration of Black culture’s charisma in opposition to Jim Crow politics. But, during the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll yielded to styles identified more with White musicians. “Rock” became more than just entertainment: The Beatles’ “invasion” from Great Britain signaled new cultural predominance; Bob Dylan’s infusion of folk music signified youth culture’s bohemianism and alternative lifestyle; Black soul and “hippie” acid rock rounded out a socially resistant counterculture. This revolt climaxed at the 1969 rock music festival Woodstock. But, in 1970, three tragedies – the Charles Manson cult’s mass murders, a killing at California’s Altamount Music Festival, and the National Guard ‘s killing of antiwar protesters at Kent State University – marked the end of the era. Yet, rock assimilated new lasting values into American society.

In this chapter, I explore historical phenomena across a century of African American poetry, mapping a series of trends through which Black vernacular music and language come together in distinct poetic modes. Within this tradition, poets have consistently innovated the genre by incorporating culturally specific forms and expressive practices from the Black vernacular. While this conflation of music and writing has led to much innovation, it also carries immense political significance, by challenging the hegemony of Western aesthetic criteria and recording Black experience and cultural knowledge against racism’s denigrations or erasures. In this multiform articulation of Black subjectivity across time, African American poets have continually affirmed the importance of music as a cultural repository and a model for alternative poetics.

Referring to the medical model of frenzy sketched out in the first two chapters, Chapter 3 explores the metaphysical problems which it caused. The model’s insistence on the total dependence of the mind on the brain, it argues, placed pressure on a Christian cosmology in which ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were supposed to be fully separable. Frenzy forced contemporaries to ask how it was possible for the human mind – made in the ‘image of God’ – to be impaired by organic disease. For most early modern Christians, the mind was a part of the soul, and this soul was immaterial, incorruptible, and immortal. Frenzy gave the impression that it invaded every part of the person, but this impression was false. The soul had to be immune to brain disease. This chapter examines the ancient roots of this problem, and examines how early modern England’s preachers, physicians, and philosophers attempted to solve it.

The Conclusion draws together the book’s various thematic strands: the perceived primacy of the ‘reason’, the right of its possessors to rule, the exculpatory effect of a frenzy diagnosis, and the high cost paid by those who received one. It returns to the larger question posed at the outset: whether the organ of the brain and the faculties of the mind were seen as constitutive of ‘personhood’ in pre-1700s England. The responses to frenzy which we have encountered in this book suggests that they were. The operations of the mental faculties known as ‘reason’, ‘will’, and ‘memory’ (or simply the ‘wits’) were located in (and often colloquially identified with) the brain. The functionality and continuity of these faculties was integral to the maintenance of legal, social, and spiritual personhood. Yet what troubled frenzy’s witnesses the most, the Conclusion argues, was the way it disrupted its sufferers’ predictable ways of being in the world – the values they had once held dear, the ways they had once looked and spoken. It was a disease which had the power to change friends, neighbours, and loved ones beyond recognition.

Chapter 2 considers how the diagnosis of frenzy – in its standard definition, an inflammation of the brain or meninges – both shaped and was shaped by anatomical knowledge. Reading the work of the anatomist Thomas Willis (1621–1675) alongside his various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interlocutors, it situates his anatomical work within a longer tradition of brain–mind cartography. The chapter argues that Willis’s determination to map the functions of the brain onto its structures was driven, in part, by his clinical experiences of frenzy. His explicit hope was that his anatomy would be the foundation stone on which a new, clinically useful ‘Pathologie of the Brain and nervous stock, might be built’. But not all of his hopes for the project were medical in nature, or even this-worldly. Willis also sought to shore up two vital truths, both of which frenzy seemed to undermine: first, that there was a categorical difference between the human soul and that of all other living beings, and second, that the human soul alone would survive the death of the body.

The Introduction situates the book’s contribution in relation to the historiographies of madness, medicine, emotion, selfhood, and personhood. While mania and melancholy have enjoyed perennial scholarly interest, the same cannot be said of early modern frenzy. The Introduction offers some thoughts as to why frenzy has been neglected, and reflects on some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which accompany its study. It explains the book’s scope (and limits), and offers short summaries of its six chapters. Sketching out the book’s central claim – that frenzy had devastating effects on personhood, and that these effects drove its early modern observers to unpick the tangle of mind, soul, and brain – it engages with recent claims about the emergence of a distinctively modern ‘cerebral self’. It sets out to test the claim that the possession of certain ‘psychological features, such as memory, consciousness, and self-awareness’ was not constitutive of ‘personhood’ until the end of the seventeenth century.

This chapter explores the range of philosophical, literary, and religious ideas about the rational-discursive faculty and species identity that medieval audiences inherited from ancient Greece and the Hellenizing poetry of ancient Rome. It argues that this inheritance was profoundly ambivalent. In both the medieval Ovide moralisé and Plato’s Timaeus, any cognitive differences between species become relativized by the assertion that souls continually transmigrate from one body to another; additionally, under certain circumstances, it seems as though the rational-discursive faculty can be located beyond the limits of the human being. Aristotle advanced a comparatively hardline position: Humans are the only rational animals (although certain creatures like parrots raise potential difficulties). On the level of literary fantasy, the “Philomena” tale of the Ovide moralisé and the Old Occitan Novas del papagay probed at the limits of the same questions investigated by ancient authorities and their medieval translators, the ambivalent details of their diction condensing some of the thorniest dilemmas hidden at the intersection of speech and species.