Bardaisan’s psychology. Known and unknown testimonies and current scholarly perspectives

The issue explored here is why Mani asserted in his "Book of the Mysteries" that, according to the followers of Bardaisan of Edessa, the living soul purifies itself and ascends inside the corpse: how can we understand this testimony? After a revision of all the known fragments about the topic and the edition of a new witness by Diodore of Tarsus, it is possible to conclude that the Bardaisanite doctrine of the soul is strictly connected with the debate arisen in Christian and Gnostic circles of the 2nd and 3rd centuries regarding the role and the final destination of soul. The Bardesanite literature appears to have articulated more than one position about the matter. According to the fragments quoted in Ephrem’s "Against Bardaisan", the intellect is something connected with the gracious gift of divine life in the time of the origins (the blow of Gen. 2:7), subsequently lost because of sin, and finally revivified by the Lord , while the soul, despite its derivation from the matter and the astral spheres, is the place of man’s subjectivity and is destined to salvation only if the ties with the intellect-life are not broken. In other fragments (HH 55, Moshe bar Kepha) this gift of life comes from characters, such as the Father and the Mother of Life, that could be connected with Gnostic speculations. On the other hand, according to the "Book of the Laws of the Countries" (school of Bardaisan), while the body has been affected by Fate and the soul has been touched by it, the intellect is a natural component of man and the place of his subjectivity and of the image of God, completely independent of Fate.