The Divided Mind: A Psychological Tale of Two Sauls, and Evagrius of the Desert

Introduction

The canonical status of psychology within the sciences is contested, but its modern emergence is often treated as though it marked the beginning of serious inquiry into the human mind. Yet long before Vienna, Biblical, Classical, and medieval Christian writers had already developed sophisticated accounts of inwardness, self-division, desire, suffering, and contemplation.

This paper investigates that history: I examine how Hebrew, Greek and Christian philosophical-theological traditions functioned as legitimate literary psychologies that anticipated later concerns surrounding cognition, habituation, introspection, and the divided mind. Beginning with Aristotle’s conception of the psuhé, I draw attention to a shared resistance to substance dualism with the Hebrew Biblical writers. I then draw attention to Saul’s psychological portrait in the David story, and, drawing on Augustine and Origen’s commentaries, explore connections to the Apostle Paul’s phenomenological illustration of the divided will. Finally, I explore how Evagrius extends and develops Paul’s themes. I argue that these premodern traditions contributed rich models of the inner life grounded in the phenomenology of confession, moral struggle, contemplation, and lived inward experience.

I

—Athens and Jerusalem—

In contrast to modern-day psychology, which relies on empirical accounts of a person’s behaviours or brain activity, ancient psychology studied the psuhé itself (often translated “soul”) directly: the principle of life, perceptions, desires, and thought.

Plato presented the psyche as internally divided into a tripartite structure[1]:

Between 1) rational, 2) spirited, and 3) appetitive elements.

For Plato, psychological disorder emerges when reason (1) loses control over desire (3). He was a “substance dualist”. He thought that the psuhé was a substance capable of surviving the death of the body.

Aristotle’s De Anima further develops, but diverges from Plato’s account, introducing a non-dualistic account of the psuhé:

The psuhé is conceived as the animating principle of a living body, rather than a separate, immaterial “ghost” inhabiting it. Sensation, appetite, memory, imagination, and rationality are all understood as capacities of the living person rather than processes occurring within a detached inner entity.

As Peter M.S. Hacker identifies[2], Aristotle’s view strikingly parallels the psycho-anthropology in the Hebrew Bible. He notes both Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew resist the later Cartesian impulse to treat the self as an immaterial substance inhabiting a body:

The Hebrew nefesh does not refer to an immaterial soul trapped in a body.

“In Ancient Hebrew and in Homeric Greek alike, the term for body… was restricted to what we now call ‘the corpse’, and no word was used to speak of the body a living man has.

… When body and soul are contrasted… further liabilities and susceptibilities other than to mere sensation are commonly allocated to the body—to the flesh. For lust, greed and gluttony, cravings and addictions—the ‘lower passions’ or appetites—are often (especially in Christian cultures) associated with the body in the divide between body and soul. Consequently, when the soul is contrasted with the body or the flesh, a quite different distinction is being drawn than that between the mind and the body, no matter whether the latter distinction is construed in Cartesian terms or along the lines described in this book.”[3]

Robert Alter’s translation and commentary support Hacker’s insight. Although nefesh is frequently translated “soul”[4], Alter suggests that this translation is misleading. Nefesh properly refers not to a Cartesian ghost, but either the capacity for life that they possess, or often, to the living person, or living creature themselves:

“Nefesh… refers to the breath of life in the nostrils of a living creature and, by extension, “lifeblood” or simply “life,” and by another… association, “person”; and it is also used as an intensifying form of the personal pronoun, having roughly the sense of “very self.” In the face of this bewildering diversity of meaning, one is compelled to abandon… lexical consistency and to translate… according to immediate context.”

Hacker also identifies that psychological predicates apply to persons, not to hidden inner entities (material or otherwise).

—Psychological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible—

Here, I turn attention to the David Story, which contains some of the richest psychological insights in literary history. Aspects of melancholy, madness, tragedy, and mystery populate its pages. Few figures in the Hebrew Bible receive as penetrating a psychological portrait as King Saul in I Samuel 16: 14-17:

And the spirit of the LORD had turned away from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD had struck terror in him.[5]

Here we have a window into the mind of the Ancient Israelite: Saul’s psychosis is not attributed to dysfunctional biology, but to his dysfunctional relationship with God, “possession by a divine spirit”[6]. The spirit of kingship formerly bestowed on Saul has left him and transferred to David, replaced instead with an evil one. The narrative presents what Alter calls a “theo-psychology”[7]: spiritual disorder manifests itself as psychological suffering.

Yet the text presents a curious puzzle. Although rejected as king and increasingly consumed by envy toward David, Saul retains his prophetic status and gifts. He remains “among the prophets.”[8] The coexistence of divine inspiration and moral corruption raises a question that fascinated later Christian writers:

Can a person possess spiritual gifts while remaining morally disordered?

Here, Augustine’s commentary is particularly instructive. Augustine addresses precisely this tension in his sermon on 1 Corinthians 13. Reflecting on Saul, he argues that prophetic gifts do not necessarily indicate spiritual health:

[Saul] has the gift of prophecy, but he has not got charity. He has become a kind of instrument… touched by the Spirit, not one to be cleansed by the Spirit…

So, we have proved that it is possible for you to… prophesy, and not to have charity. But prophecy does you no good, according to the apostle: “If I do not have charity,” he says, “I am nothing.” He doesn’t say, “Prophesy is nothing,” or “Faith is nothing,” but “I myself am nothing, if I don’t have charity.” So, while [Saul] has great gifts, he is nothing; although he has great gifts, he is nothing; because these great gifts which he has, he doesn’t have to his benefit, but to his condemnation. It isn’t a great thing to have great gifts; but it is a great thing to use great gifts well; but you don’t use them well if you haven’t got charity. The fact is, it is only good will that uses anything well; but there cannot be a good will where charity is not to be found.[9]

For Augustine, Saul exemplifies Paul’s warning that extraordinary gifts are worthless without love. One may prophesy, possess faith, or exercise religious authority, yet remain inwardly fragmented. The decisive issue is not what gifts a person possesses, but whether those gifts are ordered by charity. Saul’s tragedy becomes a study of the divided self: His envy of David gradually supplants the love and fidelity that ought to govern his actions. He speaks God’s words while attempting to destroy God’s chosen servant[10]. The contradiction is not merely moral; it is psychological. Saul simultaneously knows and resists the good. His prophetic gifts remain intact while his desires become increasingly pathological.

Saul’s mind is divided—persecuting and prophesying—that contradiction itself demonstrates not just psychological, but spiritual madness. And in this respect, Saul anticipates one of the central themes of later psychology: the divided mind. The human person is not simply torn between reason and appetite, as in Plato’s account, but between competing desires. Augustine’s interpretation, therefore, shifts the analysis from cognition to desire. Saul’s madness arises not merely from ignorance, but from a corruption of will—a theme that will reach its fullest expression in Paul’s account.

II

—Paul: The Divided Mind—

The parallel between Saul of Tarsus, and Saul, King of Israel, is not accidental. Both are religious authorities who persecute those chosen by God. Both act with a theological certainty later shown to be profoundly mistaken. In neither case is the problem a lack of intelligence or religious commitment. Rather, the narratives show that a person’s judgement can be distorted by envy, zeal, or other motives of which they are not aware.

Augustine’s discussion of Saul illustrates a recurring biblical theme: possession of religious office, spiritual gifts, or sincere conviction does not guarantee sound judgement or moral integrity. A person may believe himself to be acting in God’s service while acting against God’s purposes. The passions can lead not only to psychological, but spiritual disorders. In his letter to the Romans 7:14-25, Paul outlines an in intricate illustration of a universal human phenomenon—the divided will:

For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?[11]

At first glance, the passage reads as a confession: Paul narrating his own psychological struggle with sin. But interestingly, this reading was contested by the earliest Christian commentators.

Origen resists it directly, arguing that Paul cannot be describing his own experience, since a man “carnal and sold under sin[12]“ would not recognise the law as spiritual, and Paul clearly does. For Origen, Paul is instead deploying pedagogical rhetoric: he assumes the role of the weak believer, as he does elsewhere when he writes “I became weak to the weak, so that I might win the weak.” Origen finds precedent for this in the Psalms, where holy men routinely speak in the voice of sinners, giving words to experiences not their own in order to instruct and console those who suffer them.

If Paul is not confessing but performing—giving voice to a divided consciousness not his own, but a universal structure of fallen experience—then Romans 7 is not a private psychological diary, but something closer to what we might call a phenomenological description: an account of “what it is like”[13], from the inside, to be a person whose desires are in conflict with their own better judgment. The divided mind Paul articulates is not his particular pathology, but the common condition of persons who know the good, and yet find themselves drawn elsewhere. What is remarkable is that this condition is so universal that Paul can simply adopt it as a persona that his readers will recognise themselves in without being told to.

This is precisely where the two Sauls converge most forcefully. Paul’s rhetorical manoeuvre—inhabiting the divided consciousness in order to illuminate it—mirrors the narrative function Saul’s madness performs in the David story. Neither is a simple confession. Both are literary, theo-psychological constructions that use inwardness as a teaching device: showing the reader the structure of self-division so that it can be recognised, named, and addressed. The difference is that Paul goes further than the Saul narrative does—he not only dramatises the divided will, but diagnoses it, locating its root not in ignorance, nor in weakness of rational control over appetite (as Plato might), but in a deeper disorder of desire, a will that simultaneously knows and resists the good. The divided mind, like Saul, knows God yet resists Him.

Origen’s reading transforms the tone of Paul’s passage from pessimistic to optimistic: the reader can be confident that if they are spiritual, they will do the good and resist evil more readily. This makes Origen’s reading theologically coherent in a way the autobiographical reading struggles to be. If Romans 7 describes the permanent condition of even the regenerate Christian (as the later Augustine thought), the passage risks a kind of deterministic despair: even after conversion, the will remains hopelessly divided. Origen refuses that conclusion. The divided consciousness of Romans 7 is not the final word on human experience, but a stage—the condition of the person still captive to the flesh, depicted vividly so that the spiritual reader can recognise what they are being delivered from.

III

—Evagrius and the Sin Cycles: A Proto-Psychology of the Divided Mind—

If Paul provides the most penetrating scriptural account of inner division, it is Evagrius (345–399 AD) who polishes its furniture psychologically. Writing from the Egyptian desert under the tutelage of the Fathers there, Evagrius produced what is, by any measure, one of the most sophisticated psychological frameworks in the ancient world.

Evagrius identified eight logismoi[14]—”self-sustaining sequences of desire, imagination, will and intellectual intention”[15]. Intrusive, recurrent cycles of thought, or mental events—gluttony, lust, greed, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride—the logismoi were not merely sins, but patterns of cognition[16] that arise involuntarily, press themselves on the monk’s attention, and, if left unexamined, draw the will into a consenting act[17]. This psychological precision is what distinguishes Evagrius from his contemporaries. He was not primarily cataloguing offences, but mapping the terrain of the mind’s battleground.

Evagrius’ logismoi function in a strikingly similar way to Freud’s account of the unconscious mind—unresolved psychological conflicts do not simply disappear; They return in a disguised or displaced form against our conscious will. They are not chosen thoughts, but thoughts that arrive[18]—erupting from what Evagrius calls the pathe[19], the disordered passions, embedded in the mind through habit[20] and prior consent. The monk does not decide to think about food, or to feel the pull of resentment: these arise. The question of moral and psychological health is not whether such thoughts arise, but what one does when they do.

What Evagrius adds with “unprecedented psychological subtlety”[21], and what purely cognitive accounts tend to lack, is an account of how the logismoi form cycles—how one disordered passion generates the conditions for another[22]. The logismoi are not eight independent disorders, but an interconnected ecology of psychic dysfunction. Gluttony weakens the capacity for ascetic effort and inflames lust[23]; lust, when frustrated, produces sadness; sadness, persisting, hardens into acedia—that characteristic spiritual torpor[24], the noonday demon, which renders the monk unable to pray, to read, to remain present to his life. Acedia in turn breeds vainglory—the fantasised escape into imagined recognition—and vainglory opens onto pride[25], the most dangerous logismos, in which the monk attributes his achievements to his own power, rather than to God’s grace. Each passion creates the soil in which the next takes root. This is a model of psychological comorbidity, fifteen centuries before the concept existed in contemporary psychology.

Conclusion

The traditions surveyed in this paper—from Aristotle and the Hebrew psyche, Augustine’s theo-psychology of Saul, through Paul’s account of the divided mind, to Evagrius’s systematic phenomenology of the logismoi—do not constitute a prehistory of psychology in the sense of a crude anticipation soon superseded by the real thing. Rather, it is a psychology of a different kind: one grounded not in the laboratory but in the study of mental life itself, one that takes seriously not just the mechanisms of the mind but the question of what the mind is for. The modern psychological tradition has, in many respects, described the same territory with greater scientific precision. But it purchases this precision at the price of leaving phenomenology out—what mental life is actually like. And in that gap, the ancient literary psychologies still have something interesting to offer.

References:

Alter, Robert. The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. 3 vols. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.

Aristotle. De Anima (On the Soul). Translated by Christopher Shields. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016.

Augustine. Sermons (148A–183). Translated by Edmund Hill. The Works of Saint Augustine III/5. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1992.

Evagrius Ponticus. Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer. Translated by John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies Series 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981.

Evagrius Ponticus. The Greek Ascetic Corpus. Translated by Robert E. Sinkewicz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hacker, P. M. S. “The Self and the Body.” In Human Nature: The Categorial Framework, 257–84. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Hart, David Bentley. The Story of Christianity. London: Quercus, 2011. 72–74.

Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (Anglicised Edition). 1989.

Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50.

Origen. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 6–10. Translated by Thomas P. Scheck. The Fathers of the Church 104. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002.

Plato. Republic. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

[1] Notably, this resembles Sigmund Freud’s model of “it”, “I” and “Super-I”.

[2] Hacker, “The Self and the Body,” in Human Nature (2010).

[3] Hacker, “The Self and the Body,” in Human Nature (2010) p. 272-273.

[4] See for example, the King James Bible

[5] Alter. I Samuel 16:14-17. The Hebrew Bible (2017) pp. 1771-1772.

[6] Ibid. p. 1772.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Twice, in fact. See 1 Samuel 10:11, 19:24

[9] Augustine. Sermon 162A

[10] 1 Samuel 19:23-24

[11] Paul. Romans 7:14-25. NRSV.

[12] Origen. Commentary On the Epistle to the Romans. (246 C.E.) Ch. 7.

[13] Attributed to Nagel, T. See What Is It Like To Be a Bat?

[14] Evagrius, Praktikos 6 (380 C.E.)

[15] Hart, D.B., The Story of Christianity (2013), p. 73

[16] Evagrius, On Thoughts 1.

[17] Ibid. Praktikos 74

[18] Praktikos 74

[19] Praktikos 37.

[20] Praktikos 37.

[21] Hart. p. 73

[22] Praktikos 58

[23] Praktikos 40–41.

[24] Praktikos 12.

[25] Praktikos 13–14.