Catharsis

CATHARSIS. - Greek word (κάθαρσις, synonym καθαρμός), meaning "purification", which, originally proper to religious language, was used by the Pythagoreans in a therapeutic and ethical sense.

In the religious field the concept and practice of c. are very ancient and form part of the Mediterranean substratum of Greek religion. It has a fundamentally magical value and excludes any ethical signification: it is an operation by which a person or a thing is purified, that is, materially freed from an impurity (μίασμα) that contaminates it and is always understood as material impurity. The causes of contamination are numerous, but the principal ones are connected with the acts of being born and of dying (cf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 381 ff.). Particularly grave is the contamination of homicide. The means of purification are various: principally, water, fire, blood. It acquires the greatest importance in the archaic age under the influence of the sanctuary of Delphi and of Orphism, which extends its action to the afterlife, broadening and in a certain sense also elevating its concept. From religious language the Pythagoreans took it in order to transfer it to the therapeutic-ascetic language of their rule of life, calling c. both the dietary practice which they used to keep the body healthy and the ascetic one which had as its object the health of the soul. For the care of the soul, aiming to eliminate whatever in it is emotive and irrational (τὸ ἐμπάθις καὶ ἄλογον), they made use of music (Aristoxenus, in H. Diels, Vorsokratiker, 5th ed., I, Berlin 1934, 58 D 1: cf. Plutarch, Is. et Oz., 384 d; Iamblichus, Vita Pyth., 110-14).

The word has a strictly medical meaning in the school of Hippocrates. And this and the other senses described above are found in Plato, who in the Sophist (226 c) defines cathartics as a species of the art "of discrimination". Of particular importance, as regards musical c., is the passage of the Laws in which, treating of the therapeutic action that movement has on the passionate states of the soul, Plato connects the rocking and singing with which nurses put children to sleep with the dance and music with which in the practice of the mysteries the Corybantic frenzy is calmed (790 c-d). With this passage must be connected the famous passage of Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, where he says that all are more or less subject to certain passions, such as "pity, terror", and some especially to enthusiasm or Bacchic frenzy, and that the latter, when they hear "the melodies that put the soul in an orgiastic state, return to their normal state (καθισταμένους) as under the action of a medicine or of a c." (ὥσπερ ἰατρείας τυγόντας καὶ καθάρσεως). And he continues: "the same must necessarily happen to those who are subject to pity and to terror and in general to the passions... and that in all a kind of c. is produced and they are pleasantly relieved by it" (κουφίζεσθαι μεθ' ἠδονῆς: Pol., VIII, 7, 1341 b 32 ff.).

In this same passage Aristotle refers, for a more detailed treatment of c., to the Poetics, but in the Poetics, whose Book II was lost in the pre-Byzantine age, c. is named, without any explanation, only once, in the celebrated and much-disputed definition of tragedy, so that, if the text of Book I is intact, Aristotle must have treated it in Book II. In the passage in question it is said that tragedy "through pity and terror arrives at the c. that is proper to such passions" (ch. 6). That the c. spoken of here is identical with that to which Aristotle alludes in the Politics cannot be doubted, and, this being granted, it is a psychopathic and not an aesthetic fact, as H. Weil (1847) and J. Bernays (1857) maintained, the one independently of the other, and as results with full evidence from the allusions found in Plutarch (Quant. conv., 657 a), Aristides, Quintilian (De mus., 3, 25), Iamblichus (De myst., 1, 11) and Proclus (In Plat. Remp., I, pp. 42 and 49, ed. W. Kroll). Tragedy, whose property it is to provoke pity and terror, simultaneously effects their purgation by homeopathic means. The doctrine is directed against Plato and makes use of his own weapons. If the action of pity and terror is homeopathic, one must not however understand that tragedy is itself a homeopathic remedy for those who are subject to these passions. The end of tragedy is not c.; c. is only an accident (συμβεβηκός) and forms part of the effects that it produces on the spectator, and is not even proper to it (ἴβων in the technical sense of the term). A problem which, given the texts, it is not possible to resolve with certainty is how c. is produced, whether in the manner indicated by Plato (see above) or through the relief that the soul experiences (κουφίζεσθαι), as is said in the Politics, and whether the pleasure that accompanies it is that which is proper to every relief or that which is inseparable from the vision and which makes even pain pleasant (Poet., 4, 1448 b 9; Rhet., I, 11; Part. anim., I, 5, 645 a 11), or, as is more likely, both together.

With an ethical-metaphysical meaning c. has an important place in Plotinus. It indicates the liberation of the soul from matter and from the lower life, which is brought about gradually through art, science and virtue (Enn., I, 2, 3; 6, 6). By means of this purification the soul almost returns to its original purity and splendor and disposes itself to the ecstatic vision and to union with the One (Enn., VI, 9-11).

Carlo Diano