Abstrakt: | The soul in the ascetic teaching of Aphrahat was understood as being the element
which gave life to the body. Properly nurtured it guaranteed the ascetic
a moral development. This role of the soul as the foundation of life influenced
his outlook on morality and sensuality. The answer to the biblical „living soul”
was in his Demonstrations expressed as . This implied a spiritual
energy, which every person is born with, which is eternal and adorned with a sensitivity
of thought. Death embraced both the body and the soul, except that, for
the „living soul”, it was equated with sleep. Analysing the anthropological terminology
exposed a strong influence of biblical concepts. The Semitic character
of this Persian’s anthropology created problems in the precise indication of the
semantic bounds of these ideas such as , . The search was not limited
only to seeking out the exclusive character of individual human attributes, but also
to try to discover their association and interdependence. From the anthropological
material of ascetic teaching in the Demonstrations emerges a vision of a man
integrated, in whom the corporal is subjected to the spirit and the external signs
(speech and conduct) are in harmony with the internal (thought and feelings). |