CATARSIS. - Greek word (καθαρσός, synonymous with καθαρμός), meaning “purification,” originally belonging to religious language and adopted by the Pythagoreans in a therapeutic and ethical sense.
In the religious sphere the idea and practice of catharsis are very ancient and form part of the Mediterranean religious background of Greek religion. It has a fundamental magical value and excludes any ethical significance: it is an operation by which a person or thing is purified, i.e., materially freed from a stain (μίασμα) that contaminates it, always understood as a material impurity. The two kinds of contaminating stain are numerous, but the principal ones are connected with the acts of birth and death (cf. Euripides, *Iph. Taur.*, 38 ff.). Particularly grave is the contamination of homicide. The means of purification are various: chief among them are water, fire, and blood. In the archaic age, under the influence of the Delphic sanctuary and of Orphism—which extends its action to the beyond, to the after-life, and in a certain sense even elevates its concept—catharsis acquires the greatest importance.
From religious language the Pythagoreans took it over and transferred it to their therapeutic-ascetic language of life according to their rule, calling catharsis both the dietary practice they used to keep the body healthy and the ascetic practice aimed at the health of the soul. For the cure of the soul, which aimed at eliminating whatever in it was emotional and irrational (τὸ ἐμπαθὲς καὶ ἄλογον), they made use of music (Aristoxenus, in H. Diels, *Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker*, 5th ed., I, Berlin 1934, 58 D 1; cf. Plutarch, *Is. et Os.*, 38d; Iamblichus, *Vita Pyth.*, 110-14).
The word has a strictly medical meaning in the school of Hippocrates. Both this and the other senses described above are found in Plato, who in the *Sophist* (226d) defines the cathartic as a species of the “discriminating” art. Of particular importance, as regards musical catharsis, is the passage in the *Laws*, where Plato, discussing the therapeutic action that movement has upon the passional states of the soul, relates the lulling and singing by which nurses put children to sleep with the dance and music by which in the practice of the mysteries the Corybantic frenzy is calmed (790c-d). To this passage should be connected the famous text in the eighth book of Aristotle’s *Politics*, where he says that all men are more or less subject to certain passions, such as “pity and fear,” and some in particular to Bacchic enthusiasm or madness, and that these latter, when they hear “melodies that put the soul in an orgiastic state, return to a normal state (καθιστάμενοι) as under the action of a medicine or a catharsis” (ὥσπερ ἰατρείας τυγχάνοντες καὶ καθάρσεως). He continues: “The same thing necessarily happens to those who are subject to pity and fear and in general to the passions… and a kind of catharsis is produced in all of them, and they are thereby agreeably nurtured” (ἀγαθὸν γὰρ ἂν εἴη… μεθ’ ἡδονῆς: *Pol.*, VIII, 7, 1341b 32 ff.).
In this same passage Aristotle refers, for a more detailed treatment of catharsis, to the *Poetics*, but in the *Poetics*—whose Book II was lost in pre-aristotelian times—catharsis is mentioned only once, without any explanation, in the celebrated and much-debated 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 fear effects the catharsis proper to such emotions” (ch. 6). That the catharsis here spoken of is identical with that to which Aristotle refers in the *Politics* cannot be doubted, and, granted this, it is a psychopathic and not an aesthetic fact, as H. Weil (1847) and J. Bernays (1857) maintained independently of one another, and as is clearly shown by the references in Plutarch (*Quaest. conv.*, 657a), 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, which has the power to arouse pity and fear, at the same time operates upon them homoeopathically to purge them. The doctrine is directed against Plato and uses his own weapons. If homoeopathic is the action of pity and fear, it must not, however, be understood that tragedy itself is a homoeopathic remedy for those subject to these passions. The end of tragedy is not catharsis; catharsis is merely an incidental result (συμβεβηκός) and forms part of the effects it produces upon the spectator, nor is it proper to it (ἔθος in the technical sense). One problem, which, given the texts, cannot be resolved with certainty, is how catharsis is produced—whether in the way indicated by Plato (see above) or by the relief the soul experiences (χορίζεσθαι), as it is said in the *Politics*, and whether the pleasure that accompanies it is that proper to every relief or that inseparable from vision and which makes even pain pleasant (Poet., 4, 1448b 9; *Rhet.*, I, 11; *Part. anim.*, I, 5, 645a 11), or, as is more probable, both together.
With an ethical-metaphysical meaning catharsis occupies an important place in Plotinus. It signifies the liberation of the soul from matter and from lower life, which is gradually achieved through art, science, and virtue (*Enn.*, I, 2, 3; 6, 6). By this purification the soul almost returns to its original purity and splendor and is disposed for ecstatic vision and union with the One (*Enn.*, VI, 9-11).
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