St. Theophan the Recluse and the Etheric Body

The soul in the letters of St. Theophan the Recluse

“Once, in the middle of the dance floor at some annual ball, a young lady had a sudden glimpse of the immortality of her soul; and as this vision flashed upon her inward eye, she was struck with the thought that all this swirling around the dance floor was utterly futile. Amazed and disturbed, she wrote to the recluse: ‘Is this normal, or is it a morbid hindrance to a desire for a happy life in the world?’ The answer to her question evoked a correspondence which resulted in this volume.” 

So begins the book that collects these letters between St. Theophan the Recluse and the young woman regarding the life of the soul. This collection, titled The Spiritual Life and How to be Attuned to It, became an instant classic in Orthodox Russia after its publication in 1878, where it was reprinted six times prior to the Revolution. Its popularity later spread to the English speaking world after its translation in 1996, when it was published by St. Herman’s Press. The Spiritual Life has quickly become one of the most widely read spiritual works among Orthodox converts in the United States, due in no small part to Seraphim Rose’s efforts at introducing St. Theophan to Christians interested in Orthodoxy through his publication house at St. Herman’s. 

What exactly is it that makes St. Theophan so popular? I’d argue it’s his ability to connect with the modern reader in a way that other 19th century Orthodox figures, and arguably even modern ones, don’t. Theophan writes to the everyday person in everyday language, addressing the recipients of his letters as if he were right there in front of them to answer their questions, share their burdens, and care for their struggles. It’s this personability that makes St. Theophan so eminently readable. 

That said, Theophan isn’t afraid to wade into deep waters, steeped as he was in the rich patristic tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church and at the very the forefront of theological discourse as dean of the Theological Academy of St. Petersburg. When he isn’t advising his readers on matters of daily life such as dealing with hopelessness or alienation, he’s expounding the tripartite structure of the human being, or describing the etheric nature of the soul. 

It’s this latter side of Theophan that caught my attention when I first picked up The Spiritual Life. I had never, until this point, read such a detailed description of the soul’s form in the Christian tradition: the soul as I had understood it had always been described in Christianity as without form, shape, or substance—a side effect of a non-denominational environment. If it wasn’t in the Bible, it didn’t concern us. And so the kind of questions I had when I was younger (What is the soul? What are angels made of? What is the resurrected body?) often went unanswered. 

St. Theophan the Recluse’s description of the luminous vehicle of the soul came back to me while reading Gregory Shaw’s Hellenic Tantra. Near the end of his comparative study on Neoplatonic and Eastern religion, Shaw describes the subtle body of the soul in both Iamblichus’ theurgy and the tantric practices of Tibet and India. A subtle, etheric body that unites the soul with the physical body sounded familiar, I had encountered it before in St. Theophan. But where did St. Theophan encounter it? How did an Orthodox saint come to write of something typically left to the theurgists, theosophists, and practitioners of Eastern religions? 

Before I get ahead of myself, lets look at the passages in question. In one letter Theophan writes to the young woman: 

“In case you have not forgotten, at one time I began talking with you about an exceedingly subtle element that is finer than light. It is called ether. Let us suppose that it exists as a matter of fact, and not just in name. I recognize that such a very subtle element exists, and that it penetrates and passes everywhere, serving as the smallest particle of material substance. 

Along with this, I suppose that within this element soar all the blessed angels—the angels and divine saints—who are themselves garbed in a kind of raiment made of that very same element. The covering of our soul (understand this word to refer also to the spirit, which is the soul of our human soul) is also made of this very same element. The soul itself is the immaterial spirit; but its covering is made from this ethereal immaterial element. Our bodies are coarse; but that covering of the soul is very fine and serves as the intermediary between the soul and body. Through it the soul acts on the body and the body on the soul. 

I am speaking of this only in passing, however. Just keep in mind that the soul has this very fine covering, and that our souls have the very same kind of covering as do all spirits. From this it will not be hard for you to conclude that this omnipresent element, very fine, out of which these coverings are made and in which all spirits soar, is the intermediary for the intermingling of our souls and these spirits.”

Here we have a description of the luminous, subtle body that serves as the vehicle for the soul. Made of ether, this fine element pervades the entirety of the material world—for Theophan, the ether is a very real substance rather than just some idea or means of analogy. 

But how does this ether work? Theophan goes on: 

“Let us return again to the divine saints. The element of which we are speaking is everywhere, and meets no obstacle to itself anywhere. Sunlight passes through glass; while the element can also pass through glass, it also permeates walls, the ground and everything else. Just as it is able to pass through everything, when that is necessary (just as the Saviour passed through into the room when the Apostles were behind a locked door). 

They occupy a definite space, but when they are enjoined to do so or are permitted, they are immediately transferred to wherever it is necessary by means of the element, and not only do they meet no obstacles, they do not even see them. When necessary, they are transferred, but when it is not necessary, they stay in their own space and see in every direction what is there and what is happening there. When their eyes turn toward earth, that is, toward us sinners, they see us clearly too. Not our coarse bodies, because that is not how they see us. Rather, they see our very souls, as they are. They do not see directly, but by means of the soul’s covering, which is like their own, and like the element in which they live, because the sate of the soul is accurately reflected by its covering.”

This ether is so fine that it passes through and permeates all matter, allowing for the soul by means of its vehicle, made of this very same element, to travel at will. Those in this etheric body are capable of moving between points without obstruction, immediately arriving at their destination. When not transferred to a particular destination, they remain “in their own space,” capable of observing the earth, yet also seeing “in every direction what is there and what is happening there.” There is a spatial aspect to the realm of etheric spirits, one where motion and sight operate under different conditions. 

When these spiritual bodies see our souls, what is it exactly that they see? 

“Imagine, if you will now, that two people are sitting and talking. During this, the soul of each person has its own disposition. Neither one sees what is in the soul of the other on account of the coarse covering of the body, beneath which the soul is concealed. The angels and saints, however, if they were to gaze upon them, would see their souls as they are and what is within them, because the state they are in, and that which is in them, are reflected in their souls’ covering. If within the soul are holy thoughts and feelings, then its covering is bright; with each holy feeling the brightness has its own character. But if the thoughts and feelings are not quite pure, then the soul’s covering is likewise not bright, and each impure feeling has its own characteristic gloom, which is sometimes like fog, at other times like the gloom of night. 

Suppose you were to rise up to heaven and perceive with angelic vision (after taking on, of course, an angelic body). Then, having turned your gaze upon the earth, you would see among the varied masses of people bright shades, semi-bright, hazy, murky. It would not be at all surprising if those who were brightly dressed seemed gloomy to you, if their souls were bad, while those in tatters would seem bright, if their souls were pure. This is how the heavenly inhabitants see us, and judging by what they see, they rejoice or grieve over us.” 

Theophan’s description of the etheric body’s light, and the brightness it takes depending on the state of the soul, bears a striking similarity to the vehicle of the soul as described by Neoplatonists like Iamblichus and Proclus. But before we take a look at the vehicle of the soul, it’s worth looking at the element ether itself. 

Holy Mount Athos by Alphonse Mucha (1926)

In the Timaeus, Plato describes a “fifth combination” used by the Demiurge in the creation of the universe. This is the dodecahedron, different from the other four Platonic solids in that rather than being made of squares or triangles it is composed of pentagons. While Plato didn’t explain further, Aristotle picked up where he left off by defining this fifth element as the substance of the cosmos. Aristotle’s ether served as an attempt to explain the circular motion of the heavenly bodies—the planets, Aristotle posited, moved locally rather than in straight lines, ceaselessly revolving the earth. This endless, perfect motion was possible for the planets due to the etheric, crystalline bodies that encased them as they swam the ether above the sublunary realm (recall St. Theophan's vehicle, made of the same element within which it moves). Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics of the Middle Ages would later champion Aristotle’s cosmology as the basis for their Christian understanding of the universe. For Aquinas, ether was the fullest potential of matter, and thus carried spiritual significance as the purest element. 

By the Renaissance the concept of ether had evolved further—from the crucible of the Middle Ages the quintessence emerged transformed in the thought of Paracelsus and his followers, now taking on a chemical dimension. Paracelsus’ quintessence became not an element in and of itself, but rather the perfection of the elements in alchemical and spagyric processes. This rebellion against Aristotle was short lived however, and as the Age of Reason dawned ether returned to its mechanical roots when Isaac Newton redefined the element once again. 

Newton’s ether was, like Aristotle’s, an attempt at answering a question: if light is made of particles, how do we explain refraction? The solution was an “aether” that served as a medium for the transmission of light and heat by way of vibrations. This aether would be composed of particles “exceedingly smaller than those of Air, or even those of Light” and “refract the rays of light not in a point, but by bending them gradually in curved lines” as the aether grew denser and denser. Eventually growing so dense, in fact, that as it travelled through space and within the planets that it would “thereby cause the gravity of those great bodies towards one another, and of their parts towards the bodies; everybody endevouring to go from the denser parts of the medium to the rarer…” As the study of light developed over the 18th and 19th centuries this medium came to be called “luminiferous aether,” still in vogue in Theophan’s time, writing as he was prior to the infamous Michelson—Morley experiment that debunked it once and for all. While ether would see a brief revival in the chemical research of the neovitalists, its role as a medium for the transmission of light had passed. But for St. Theophan it was still cutting edge science, and as we shall see, consistent with the Church fathers and the Neoplatonists who influenced them.

Madonna Laboris by Nicholas Roerich (1931)

When looking for the sources of St. Theophan’s etheric body, its important to consider both the complicated relationship between Christianity and the sources it adopts (or adapts) as well as the direct experience of Christian thinkers, experiences I will consider in the second part of this series. Plato's influence on the early Christians is undeniable—it's well documented that several of the early Christian theologians studied under and were in conversation with Neoplatonists. Origen, for example, famously studied under a certain Ammonius in Alexandria, possibly Ammonius Saccas, and Apollinaris of Laodicea replied to Porphyry's Against the Christians. Plato was respected among the Christians, and he was even considered by some to have been a pre-Christian follower of the true God, his metaphysics heavily influencing the thought of giants in Church history like Pseudo-Dionysus and St. Augustine. But it's essential to remember that above all, above even the brilliance of Plato, scriptural authority and direct experience always took precedent over the pagan philosophers. Writing of Plato and his allegory of the soul’s chariot, Gregory of Nyssa once said "we must neglect all before and since their time, whether they philosophized in prose or in verse, and we will adopt, as the guide of our reasoning, the Scripture which lays it down as an axiom that there is no excellence in the soul which is not a property as well of the Divine nature.” 

Plato’s allegory appears in the Phaedrus, where he describes the soul’s vehicle, or ochema, as consisting of three parts: a charioteer, a white horse, and a black horse. “The right-hand horse” Plato says, “is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.” The left-hand horse “is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.” The task of the charioteer is to master this black horse associated with the passions and command the white horse associated with virtue so as to ascend to the heavens. One who does so achieves theosis by contact with and assimilation to the Forms. This is the aim of the art of theurgy, as we shall soon see. 

So what is it that Gregory takes issue with here? For Gregory, the idea of a “black horse” as component of the soul is a fundamental misunderstanding of the soul as God’s very likeness: “For he who declares the soul to be God's likeness asserts that anything foreign to Him is outside the limits of the soul…” Any stain or darkness upon the soul is alien to it, unlike Plato’s ochema that consists of a corruptible component. For the Christians, the soul was attached to the body, but the corrupting influence came from the attached fallen nature rather than being inherent to the soul itself. The soul itself is perfect, but contaminated by matter. The intermediary nature of the ochema is affirmed, but its nature is clarified and the black horse discarded. This is just one example among many that serves to illustrate the fathers’ critical attitude toward the pagan philosophers—no matter how much they borrowed or modified, Scripture always had the final say in the matter. And so it could only be that the Platonism of the fathers “was eclectic, unsystematic, and unphilosophical” as W. R. Inge would observe. We will rarely find one-to-one parrallels with Platonism in the tradition of the Church (and even the often Neoplatonists disagree), yet the similarities we do find indicate the influence these ideas may have had, especially in regards to the ochema. 

In The Subtle Body: A Genealogy, Simon Cox traces the origins of the etheric ochema. It’s in the second century physician Galen that we find Plato’s ochema first joined to Aristotle’s pneuma, a subtle, vivifying force responsible for movement in the body. This pneuma flows through the nervous system and circulates in the body, a fifth element for Aristotle, but associated with air as motion and fire as warmth for the Stoics. Cox cites John Finamore on the linking of these two terms, who explains in Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul that “It is a simple step for later philosophers to combine Aristotle’s pneuma with ether, the element of the stars, and with the ‘Platonic’ ochema, also onto which the Demiurge placed the soul. This vehicle is also associated with phantasia, which, like the ochema, also serves as an intermediary between material and immaterial realms.” 

The purification of the ochema-pneuma allowed for the ascent of the soul, an ascent achieved by different methods according to the Neoplatonists of the fathers’ times: for Plotinus and Porphyry, by contemplation and the practice of virtue; for Iamblichus and Proclus, by theurgy. Its primarily in these latter Neoplatonists that we begin to see something like the luminous subtle body described by St. Theophan. 

While Iamblichus’ understanding of the soul as possessing both an ungenerated aspect and a generated one while participating in neither fully would be interesting to look at in light of Gregory’s criticism of Plato, it’s the luminous, etheric vehicle of the soul that concerns us here. Iamblichus discusses the luminous ochema-pneuma in his On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians (often shortened to simply On the Mysteries). “The images of the gods flash forth brighter than light, while those of the archangels are full of supernatural light, and those of the angels are bright,” he says, describing the grades of luminosity of spiritual beings, “But daimons glow with smouldering fire (tholôdes pur). The heroes have a fire blended of diverse elements, and of the archons those that are cosmic reveal a comparatively pure fire, while those that are material show a fire mixed from disparate and opposed elements. Souls produce a fitfully visible light, soiled by the many compounds in the realm of generation” (for a parallel regarding the hierarchy of beings, Pseudo-Dionysus’ The Celestial Hierarchy demonstrates the Christian tendency to build off of Neoplatonic concepts while remaining firmly monotheistic). The light of that illuminates them is “the one and impartible light of the Gods” which all beings participate in, some moreso than others depending on their proximity to (and alignment with) the One. At the bottom of this hierarchy are souls. 

One way to purify the soul and receive this light is by means of photogogia, a theurgic ritual involving the light of the moon, sun, water, or other external sensory objects to “conduct” the light of the Gods. Photogogia “illuminates with divine light the ethereal and luminous vehicle with which the soul is surrounded, from which divine visions occupy our phantastic power, these visions being excited by the will of the Gods.” Here we see not only the ethereal vehicle, but also the means by which the soul sees through phantasia. The soul uses this imaginative faculty to grasp intelligibles through external objects, acting as intermediary between spirit and matter. 

Iamblichus also discusses how the Gods employ light to achieve this effect: “Since, however, a contrary is receptive of a contrary, according to a mutation and departure from itself, and that which is allied to another thing, and familiar with it through similitude, is capable of receiving it, hence the illuminators receive darkness as a cooperator, and employ in illuminating the light of the sun, or of the moon, or, in short, of the air.

Macarius of Egypt by Theophanes the Greek (1378)

The ritual of photogogia provides us with some insight into the influence of the Neoplatonists on Christian thought regarding the sight of the soul, giving us a possible link in the chain from the scriptures, to the fathers, to St. Theophan. For Iamblichus, the Gods employ physical light as a means to transmit their preternatural light and engage the imagination of the theurgist. Proclus, a later Neoplatonist and ardent follower of Iamblichus, elaborates on this means of seeing in his commentary on the Republic: “…the gods themselves are incorporeal, but since those who see them possess bodies, the visions which issue from the gods to worthy recipients possess a certain quality from the gods who send them but also have something connatural with those who see them. This is why the gods are seen yet not seen at all. In fact, those who see the gods witness them in the luminous garments of their souls. The point is, they are often seen when the eyes are shut.” 

The Gods, then, don’t even have to use material light—all they have to do is engage the imaginative faculty in vision, or vision without vision. A very similar process is outlined by St. Gregory Palamas in his defense of hesychasm. Describing the means by which the heschast perceives God’s uncreated light, he says: “Then in very truth a man sees by the Spirit, not the intellect or the body, and he knows supernaturally that he beholds a light that transcends light. But by what means he sees this, he does not know then, nor can he investigate the nature of that light on account of the Spirit’s inscrutableness, by Whom he sees. And this is the same thing that Paul said when he heard ineffable things and saw invisible things. He beheld, he says, `whether out of the body I know not, or within the body I know not’. That is to say, he did not know whether it was the intellect or the body that was seeing. For he sees, but not by sense perception, and yet [he sees] like sense perception sees perceptible things, clearly and even more clearly than sense perception.” 

Palamas later quotes St. Maximus, who presents us with an interesting parallel to the way that photogogia and the supersensory perception of divine light purifies the soul and brighten the etheric body: “In this union, as St. Maximus puts it, ‘the saints by beholding the light of the hidden and more than ineffable glory themselves become capable of receiving blessed purity, together with the celestial powers.’"

What then, of the souls of the saints and angels, who see “not our coarse bodies, because that is not how they see us…They do not see directly, but by means of the soul’s covering, which is like their own, and like the element in which they live”? Clearly something, an imaginative faculty or, for the fathers, something ineffable and undefinable, senses divine light from our end. But what of the soul vehicle itself, not attached to any body as it were? 

Gregory goes on: “Moreover, ‘The vision, therefore, of this light is a union, even though for the imperfect the union be not long-lasting. And what is union with light, if not vision? But since this comes to pass after the cessation of the noetic operations, how can it be accomplished except through the Spirit? For in the light, light is seen, and that which sees is in similar light. If that which sees has no other means of operating, since it has departed from all other things, it becomes itself wholly light and becomes like that which it sees, or rather, it is united [with it] without confusion, being light and seeing light through light” (emphasis mine).” Only those souls who have achieved a lasting union with God, or theosis, are completely capable of “seeing light through light” without physical sight. Like Iamblichus, Palamas considers the complete cessation of intellectual activity necessary for divine union. “For if all their intellectual activity has stopped, how could the angels and angelic men see God except by the power of the Spirit? This is why their vision is not a sensation, since they do not receive it through the senses; nor is it intellection, since they do not find it through thought or the knowledge that comes thereby, but after the cessation of all mental activity. It is not, therefore, the product of either imagination or reason; it is neither an opinion nor a conclusion reached by syllogistic argument.” This then is why the saints and angels do not see our physical, “coarse bodies,” but rather see us as we are. 

The Neoplatonic influence, it seems, is there, whether openly acknowledged by the fathers or not. However the trajectory of their thought takes an altogether different turn in regards to the soul’s nature and its faculties, a trajectory informed by a distinctly scriptural understanding of the commonly shared Platonic terms and concepts. Unfortunately for me, St. Theophan’s own work The Soul and Angel are No Body but Spirit only exists in Russian, so we cannot be sure that St. Theophan was familiar with the Neoplatonists himself. But Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and very importantly, the Neoplatonists, have all trickled down into the theology of the church one way or another. The Neoplatonic hierarchy of spiritual beings described by Iamblichus is retained in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus, but becomes monotheistic; the ethereal body of the ochema-pneuma is accepted, but the corruptible component dismissed; and the induction of divine light so as to purify the soul finds its counterpart in the Orthodox hesychast tradition. Much more could be explored regarding the subtle body, especially the soul as space in Proclus and the use of breath in both Greco-Egyptian religion and later Orthodox Christianity. But these will have to wait. In part two, we’ll take a look at the theological discussion regarding the soul in St. Theophan’s time as well as the personal experiences of saints, mystics, and hermits who directly encountered the divine light, witnessing the ethereal nature of the soul. 

Further reading:

The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It by St. Theophan the Recluse

Hellenic Tantra by Gregory Shaw

Iamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul by John Finamore

The Subtle Body: A Genealogy by Simon Cox

On the Mysteries by Iamblichus

On the Soul and Resurrection by St. Gregory of Nyssa

The Triads by St. Gregory Palamas

“Aristotelian Aether and Void in the Universe” by Konstantinos Kalachanis, Efstratios Theodosiou, and Milan S. Dimitrijević