Conjunction of the “Chariot of the Soul” Concept in Ancient Philosophical Anthropology and of the Christian Teaching about the Image-Spirit

The article is aimed at studying the “chariot of the soul” concept interpreted as a kind of spirit (πνεῦμα) and used by Hellenistic philosophers and Christian authors, as well as its interrelations with traditional exegesis of the Book of Genesis in its narrative about the creation of man, in which the first Adam was created as a luminous spiritual image of God. In his article devoted to the study of the anthropology in Gnostic, Hermetic and early Christian texts in Thomasine tradition, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta developed a hypothesis that the tripartite anthropology, in which the mind (sometimes replaced by ‘spirit’ or ‘logos’ concepts) is opposed to the idea of a two-part human consisting of soul and body (according to the Platonic concept of man consisting of soul and body), probably goes back to Aristotle’s anthropological theory. The findings of this scholar can also be supplemented with consideration of another interpretation of the concept of the pneumatic vehicle (ὄχημα-πνεῦμα) in the Christian authors in conjunction with the motifs of the Jewish-Christian mystical tradition about the primordial luminous spiritual man, which echo this concept. Moreover, a significant role in this mystical tradition belonged to the description of the vision of the Divine throne-chariot (Merkabah) in the Book of Ezekiel, using the expression the “likeness of the image of man” (demuth kemareh Adam). According to Gilles Quispel, thanks to the Greek translation of this expression in the Septuagint as homoiōma hōs eidos anthrōpou, it absorbed the Greek philosophical Platonic idea of man, the echoes of this idea can be traced in the Christian mystical tradition called “interiorized apocalyptic” by Alexander Golitzin. The study of such concepts and teachings contributes to a better understanding of the intellectual climate of interaction between Hellenistic philosophy, the mystical tradition of biblical exegesis, and Jewish elements in early Christian theology.