The teaching of Michael Psellus on the soul of Christ and communion with God

Annotation

This paper is devoted to the teaching of Michael Psellus about the soul of Christ and the role it plays in communion with God and human salvation. Three fragments from the theological writings by Michael Psellus (Theologica) devoted to Christology are analyzed, and in which the soul of Christ is more or less detailed. The analysis involves the writings of Maximus the Confessor, on which Michael Psellus relied in two cases. In Theol. I. 43 Michael Psellus says that a person's relationship with Christ is exclusively of a spiritual and intellectual nature, excluding any bodily connection with Him. In Theol. I.12 the philosopher proposes a model of the Incarnation of God, in which the soul of Christ, on the one hand, is responsible for the unity of human nature, and on the other, is in it what is more «similar» to the divine nature in Christ. At the same time, the soul of Christ is an individual of human nature, understood as abstractly as possible, that is, purely logically. The soul imitates God by its role in the structure of God incarnation — only at a lower level, and is a unit of abstract human nature. Finally, in Theol. I.25 the Byzantine thinker shows that the soul of Christ is like the soul of Adam, but not the soul of any person, because Christ received from God not such a "breath", that is, not the soul that a person receives after the fall. At the same time, the essential characteristics of this soul are purity and godliness.

Keywords

Michael Psellus, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory the Theologian, Christology, soul, body, incarnation

Literature

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The research was carried out at the expense of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 23-28-01028
"George Gemistus Pliphon and the place of Platonism in the philosophical and theological tradition of Byzantium in the middle of the XI–XV centuries" (Federal Research Institute