The Stoics and the Holy Spirit

Stoicism, the ancient school of philosophy, had some excellent ideas. Here’s their explanation of how sound works.

We hear when the air between the sound-emitter and the listener is struck. Then it emits a wave in a spherical shape which spreads and arrives at the ears, in the same way that water in a tank forms waves in circles when a stone is thrown in.

Diogenes Laertios 7.158

A Stoic philosopher watches the sunset with a vision cone made of pneuma. (AI generated)

This is terrific. It’s practically what you’ll hear in a modern classroom. But some Stoic ideas were ... well, less excellent. Here’s their theory of vision.

We see when the light between the viewer and the object is stretched tight, in a conical shape. ... The tip of the conical shape is located at the eye, and its base in the direction of the thing seen. Information about the observed object is conveyed by the stretched air, similarly to a cane.

Diogenes Laertios 7.158

That is, they thought there are vision cones extending out of our eyes. Modern readers sometimes call them ‘vision rays’. Ancient theories of vision came in two main varieties, ‘extramissive’ and ‘intramissive’: stuff either comes out of your eye or enters it. The Stoics were firmly in the extramissive camp. As you move your eye around, it moves the vision cone, like a hand moving a cane. You sense the other end of the cone the same way that you can sense things at the end of the cane.

The Stoics thought of the vision cone as physical but intangible, like air, or light. It was made of a substance that they called pneuma: literally, ‘breath’.

In philosophical contexts, the custom is to translate pneuma as ‘spirit’.

Pneuma and logos

Among the concepts that the Stoics used to talk about how the universe works are two influential words that don’t translate straightforwardly: pneuma, πνεῦμα, literally ‘breath’; and logos, λόγος, literally ‘word’ or ‘utterance’.

Pneuma is the physical medium for interactions that aren’t tangible. Light, vision cones, life force, and the soul are all made of pneuma. Pneuma is a material that’s perceptible, and physically real, but incorporeal.

The word has a heritage in Greek mystic and natural philosophy. In Orphic religion, pneuma refers to a physical manifestation of fate. Here’s a schema in the Orphic Derveni treatise (5th century BCE), as tabulated by Gábor Betegh (2004: 202):

Mythological name	Zeus	Moira [‘Fate’]
Intellectual aspect	mind (nous)	wisdom (phronesis)
Physical aspect	air (aer)	breath (pneuma)

In later centuries the Stoics adopted similar terminologies, while dropping the ‘mythological’ names. So did Philo of Alexandria, a 1st century Jewish Bible interpreter who was heavily influenced by the Stoics. Nous becomes logos, phronesis becomes sophia, aer gets sidetracked into the theory of the elements, pneuma holds on to its place.

The traditional English translation ‘spirit’ comes from the fact that the Latin for ‘breath’ is spiritus. For Stoic thought, a better English translation would be ‘force’ — force in the modern sense of an energy field, like magnetism, or classical gravity. Here’s a precisely accurate description of what the Stoics meant by pneuma:

It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star wars (1977)

χρῶ τῷ πνεύματι, ὦ Λουκᾶ. (Star wars, 1977)

The ancients didn’t think of gravity and magnetism in terms of ‘forces’. Aristotle, for example, imagined gravity as an intrinsic property, not an interaction: objects with the ‘heaviness’ property have a natural motion towards the centre of the cosmos.

But if you could go back in time and teach Zeno or Chrysippos about classical gravitational or magnetic fields, they’d definitely treat them as species of pneuma.

Then there’s logos. To the Stoics, logos was the principle that the world is rational and behaves in an intelligible way. Logic and maths work, sex causes pregnancy, stuff falls downwards, the sun moves around the ecliptic. That’s logos. It’s their word for what the Orphics and Plato called the cosmic nous, ‘mind’: a template for the self-consistency of the physical world.

In the Orphic Derveni treatise, ‘mind’ is a primordial creative force. Elementary matter is made to coalesce into tangible objects by the ‘colliding mind’: in Greek, krou- + nous, a retcon for ‘Kronos’. Zeus absorbs the primordial forces — ‘colliding mind’, time, the forces of life and creation — so that they become his personal attributes. As a result he acquires the persona of Protogonos, ‘first born’.

In Philo, logos is a personal attribute of God, just as Orphic nous is an attribute of the Protogonos.

And if it happens that someone is not yet worthy of being called ‘son of God’, let them hasten to adorn themselves with his protogonos logos, the eldest of angels, an archangel as it were. It possesses many names. For it is called ‘beginning’, and ‘name of God’, and logos, and ‘human in image’, and ‘the one that sees Israel’. ... for logos, the eldest, is an image of God.

Philo, On the confusion of tongues 146–147 (my translation)

The piling-up of alternate names is in much the same vein as the Derveni treatise.

Visualisation of Stoic logos. (AI generated)

Modern interpretations of logos in the Christian New Testament regularly take Philo as their starting point — most notably in John 1.1, where logos is a cosmic primordial force that shapes the tangible world.

In the beginning there was the logos, and the logos was an attribute of God, and the logos was God. This was God’s attribute in the beginning. All things came into existence through it, and nothing that exists came into existence without it.

John 1.1–3 (my translation)

Imagine a translation using Philo’s analogies: ‘In the beginning was divine reason’; ‘In the beginning was the noetic realm of incorporeal Forms’. The text could easily be read that way in the 1st century. It echoes earlier Greek thought too: ‘nothing that exists came into existence without it’ sounds almost like it’s from Parmenides.

But does early Christian thought have more in common with Philo, or with the Stoics? Modern scholars normally opt for Philo. I agree that holds true for Paul’s letters. But in the narrative books of the New Testament, pneuma isn’t just an attribute of God. It pops up in other ways too. There, we’re looking at an adaptation of Stoic language.

New Testament pneuma isn’t supernatural: it’s precisely non-supernatural. It’s an attempt to rationalise the supernatural in naturalistic terms. In the present day, believers sometimes try to rationalise a miraculous healing as a logical medical event; in antiquity, pneuma is exactly the same.

Note. On logos in Philo see Hannah 1999: 77–85; Robertson 2018: 9–28. On reading logos in the New Testament in light of Philo, see Boyarin 2017 (but cast as exclusively Jewish, with no mention of Stoicism). On nous in Plato see especially the Timaios, with discussion by e.g. Menn 1995; Mason 2013. On krou- + nous as Orphic creative force, see Derveni papyrus cols. xiv–xvi (cf. Plato Kratylos 396b), with discussion by Betegh 2004: 185–193.

Pneuma in the Bible

The Hebrew Bible often refers to the rūaḥ or ‘wind’ of God. From around the 3rd century BCE onwards, the Bible used in the Diaspora was in Greek: the Septuagint. And the Septuagint instead talks about God’s pneuma.

כי־כל־עוֹד נשמתי בי ורוח אלוֹה באפי׃

ἦ μὴν ἔτι τῆς πνοῆς μου ἐνούσης πνεῦμα δὲ θεῖον τὸ περιόν μοι ἐν ῥισίν.

... as long as my breath [Hb. nishmā, Gr. pnoë] is in me and the spirit [Hb. rūaḥ, Gr. pneuma] of God is in my nostrils, ...

Job 27.3 (MT, LXX, NRSVue)

Note. πνοή and πνεῦμα could both be translated as ‘breath’, given the right context. Philo, Allegory of the holy laws 1.42, discusses the distinction between them in Genesis 1.2 and 2.7.

So when Hellenistic Jews talked about the ‘wind of God’ in Greek, they were using language that already had a naturalistic sense. The dual senses of pneuma, as the rūaḥ of God and as a Stoic physical ‘force’, could be conflated or distinguished as needed.

Visible pneuma and extramissive vision: ‘there stabbed northward a flame of red, the flicker of a piercing Eye ...’ (Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 1955; still from The Return of the King, 2003)

Pneuma appears frequently in the New Testament. The earliest gospel, Mark, envisages it as a physical substance. You can immerse people in pneuma.

ὁ Ἰωάννης ... ἐκήρυσσεν ... ἐγὼ ἐβάπτισα ὑμᾶς ἐν ὕδατι, αὐτὸς δὲ βαπτίσει ὑμᾶς ἐν πνεύματι ἁγίῳ.

John [the Baptist] ... proclaimed ..., ‘I baptised you with water, but he will baptise you with holy pneuma.’

Mark 1.8 (my translation)

Notice that the Greek doesn’t refer to ‘the’ Holy Spirit — there’s no article. This is an uncountable noun, a substance, not a specified entity.

When Jesus casts out demons, he doesn’t do it by praying: he uses pneuma as a physical instrument.

‘If I cast out demons with Beelzebul, what do your own sons use to cast them out? They will be your judges, then. But if it is with God’s pneuma that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God is already upon you.’

Matthew 12.27–28 (my translation)

The original version of this passage, Mark 3.22–25, doesn’t mention pneuma. The introduction of pneuma makes the statement more physical, more tangible. Luke 11.15–20 makes the imagery more tactile still, writing ‘God’s finger’ instead of ‘God’s pneuma’.

All modern Bibles beg the question in passages like these by personifying pneuma as ‘the (Holy) Spirit’. That choice anticipates the doctrine of the Trinity. It excludes the meanings that the word had when these passages were written.

Occasionally, pneuma is paired with logos. (And notice that pneuma here is emphatically not an attribute of God!)

Once it became evening they brought to [Jesus] many people who were afflicted by demons, and he cast out the pneumata with logos [ἐξέβαλεν τὰ πνεύματα λόγῳ].

Matthew 8.16 (my translation)

The choice of words makes the subtext extremely clear: we’re firmly in Stoic territory. Again, you have to think about what these words meant at the time. A well informed 1st century reader might very well read it like this:

Jesus cast out the intangible physical phenomena by using a noetic template.

You can’t translate this kind of passage neutrally. Because of course these terms aren’t just Stoic terms: pneuma also means rūaḥ, logos also means ‘word’. If you look at Paul’s letters, it’s much harder to see any hint of Stoicism. There, ‘spirit’ usually is going to be the right translation.

Pneuma in Acts

Inspecting every mention of pneuma in the New Testament would be overkill for a short essay like this, but I have checked every occurrence in Acts. Out of the narrative books, Acts mentions pneuma the most — 35 times per 10,000 words, as compared with 10 to 19 in the gospels. (Among Paul’s letters, Galatians and 1 Corinthians both use it over 80 times per 10,000 words.)

Here’s how Acts uses the word pneuma:

• 24× (in 19 distinct episodes) physically, as something visible, a fluid substance (normally without a definite article), or a body part: 1.2, 1.5, 2.2–4, 4.8, 4.25, 6.3–5, 6.10, 7.55, 8.15–19, 9.17, 10.38, 11.16, 11.24, 11.28, 13.9, 13.52, 17.16, 18.25, 20.22.
• 12× (in 11 episodes) as an entity with personhood which speaks: 1.16, 5.32, 8.29, 9.31, 10.19, 11.12, 13.2–4, 15.28, 20.28, 21.11, 28.25.
• 11× ambiguous, with definite article (perhaps as an attribute of God): 1.8, 2.33, 2.38, 4.31, 5.3 (ambiguous syntax), 5.9, 10.44–47, 11.15, 15.8, 16.6, 19.6.
• 9× (in 4 episodes) as a supernatural entity other than God: 5.16, 16.16–18, 19.11–16, 23.8–9.
• 2× in a quotation from the Septuagint: 2.17–18 (≈ Joel 2.28–29).

Pneuma often has the epithet ‘holy’ (ἅγιον πνεῦμα). But even in a text as late as Acts it’s hard to be confident that that isn’t simply meant to be an antithesis to pneumata that are ‘wicked’ or ‘unclean’ (Acts 5.16, 19.11–16). Two passages juxtapose pneuma with logos, both in the third ‘ambiguous’ category (4.31, 16.6).

Some of the passages in the first category — pneuma as a physical substance — clearly envisage it as a fluid: you can be immersed in it (1.5, 11.16), anointed with it (10.38), or filled with it (2.4, 4.8, 6.3–5, 7.55, 9.17, 11.24, 13.9, 13.52), and it can boil (18.25 ζέων τῷ πνεύματι). It can be transmitted by physical contact (8.15–19, 19.6), and it can act as a medium for action at a distance when someone speaks ‘by means of pneuma’ (1.2, 4.25, 11.28).

Modern English-language Bibles can sometimes bring themselves to translate Hebrew rūaḥ as the ‘wind’ of God, instead of ‘Spirit’ with a capital S. And that’s great. It’s reasonable to make an effort with Greek pneuma and logos too!

References

• Betegh, G. 2004. The Derveni papyrus. Cosmology, theology and interpretation. Cambridge.
• Boyarin, D. 2017 [2011]. ‘Logos, a Jewish word. John’s prologue as Midrash.’ In: Levine, A.-J.; Brettler, M. Z. (eds.) The Jewish annotated New Testament, 2nd edition. Oxford. 688–691.
• Hannah, D. D. 1999. Michael and Christ: Michael traditions and angel christology in early Christianity. Tübingen.
• Mason, A. 2013. ‘The nous doctrine in Plato’s thought.’ Apeiron 46: 201–228. [DOI]
• Menn, S. 1995. Plato on God as nous. Carbondale/Edwardsville (IL).
• Robertson, D. 2018. Word and meaning in ancient Alexandria. Theories of language from Philo to Plotinus. Aldershot/Burlington (VT).