CATARSI. – A Greek word (κάθαρσις, synonym καθαρμός), meaning “purification,” which, originally belonging to religious language, was used by the Pythagoreans in a therapeutic and ethical sense.
In the religious sphere, the concept and practice of c. are extremely ancient and form part of the Mediterranean substratum of Greek religion. It is fundamentally magical in character and excludes any ethical significance: it is an operation by which a person or thing is purified, that is, materially freed from an impurity (μίασμα) that contaminates it and is always understood as a material impurity. The causes of contamination are numerous, but the principal ones are connected with the acts of birth and death (cf. Euripides, Iph. Taur., 381 ff.). Particularly serious is contamination through homicide. The means of purification are various: chiefly water, fire, and blood. It acquired the greatest importance in the archaic age under the influence of the sanctuary of Delphi and of Orphism, which extended its action to the afterlife, thereby broadening and, in a certain sense, elevating its concept as well. The Pythagoreans removed it from religious language and transferred it to the therapeutic-ascetic sphere of their rule of life, calling c. both the dietary practice they used to keep the body healthy and the ascetic practice concerned with the health of the soul. To care for the soul, with the aim of eliminating whatever in it is emotional 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 Hippocratic school. Both this and the other senses described above are found in Plato, who in the Sophist (226 c) defines cathartic art as a species of “diacritical” art. Of particular importance with regard to musical c. is the passage in the Laws in which, treating of the therapeutic action of movement upon the soul’s passionate states, Plato relates the rocking and singing with which nurses lull children to sleep to the dance and music by which, in the practice of the mysteries, Corybantic frenzy is calmed (790 c-d). This passage should be connected with the famous passage in Book VIII of Aristotle’s Politics, where he says that everyone is more or less subject to certain passions, such as “pity and terror,” and some people in particular to enthusiasm or Bacchic frenzy, and that the latter, when they hear “melodies that place the soul in an orgiastic state, return to their normal condition (καθισταμένους) as though under the action of medicine or c.” (ὥσπερ ἰατρείας τυγόντας καὶ καθάρσεως). He continues: “the same must necessarily happen to those who are subject to pity and terror and, in general, to the passions ... and in all a kind of c. must be produced, so that they may be pleasantly relieved” (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 period, c. is mentioned, without any explanation, only once, in the celebrated though much-disputed definition of tragedy. Thus, if the text of Book I is complete, Aristotle must have treated it in Book II. The passage in question states that tragedy “through pity and terror achieves the c. 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 so, it is a psychopathological, not an aesthetic, fact, as H. Weil (1847) and J. Bernays (1857) rightly maintained independently of one another, and as is clearly evident from the references 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 distinctive function is to arouse pity and terror, simultaneously effects their purgation by a homeopathic process. The doctrine is directed against Plato and employs his own weapons. Although the action of pity and terror is homeopathic, it must not, however, be understood that tragedy itself is a homeopathic drug for those subject to these passions. The end of tragedy is not c.; c. is merely an accident (συμβεβηκός) and belongs among the effects it produces upon the spectator; nor is it even proper to it (ἴβων in the technical sense of the term). A problem which, given the texts, cannot be resolved with certainty is how c. is produced: whether in the manner indicated by Plato (v. above), or through the relief experienced by the soul (κουφίζεσθαι), as stated in the Politics; and whether the pleasure accompanying it is the pleasure proper to every release or that inseparable from vision, which makes even pain pleasurable (Poet., 4, 1448 b 9; Rhet., I, 11; Part. anim., I, 5, 645 a 11), or, as is more likely, both together.
C. occupies an important place in Plotinus with an ethical-metaphysical meaning. It signifies the liberation of the soul from matter and from inferior life, achieved gradually through art, science, and virtue (Enn., I, 2, 3; 6, 6). Through this purification the soul almost returns to its original purity and splendor and prepares itself for ecstatic vision and union with the One (Enn., VI, 9–11).