Dr Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou’s Article on Collective Emotions in John Chrysostom Accepted in Mnemosyne

We are delighted to announce that an article by Dr Kyriakoula Tzortzopoulou, Postdoctoral Researcher of our project, has been accepted for publication in the prestigious journal Mnemosyne. Titled “Collective Emotions and Intersubjectivity in John Chrysostom”, the article explores how the notion of a “collective mind” was understood and cultivated in Late Antiquity through a close reading of selected homilies by St John Chrysostom (4th c. AD).

In this study, Dr Tzortzopoulou explores how a ‘collective mind’ was understood and cultivated in Late Antiquity through a critical examination of selected homilies by St. John Chrysostom (4^th c. AD). By ‘collective mind’, the author refers to a set of shared beliefs, goals and intentions, collective emotions, shared ethical dispositions, and a we-mode of thinking, which operate as a unifying force within a community. Through exemplary passages from his homilies On the Corinthians and On the Ephesians, where Chrysostom builds on the image of the Church body, this article shows how Chrysostom thinks and promotes an ideal collective character of emotional life within the Church. As it argues, the body image serves as a conceptual and pastoral framework through which Chrysostom reflects on how sympatheia, co-suffering, compassion, and love are intersubjective qualities, arising from the very perception of oneself as integrally connected to the whole and cultivated within communal participation in one’s suffering or happiness.  His ideas provide a point of comparison with modern discussions of collective and distributed cognition, offering a historical perspective on how collective mind was conceived in late antique Christianity and situating this conception within a longer intellectual history.

By placing Chrysostom’s thought in dialogue with modern discussions of collective and distributed cognition, the article offers a historically grounded perspective on the conceptualisation of shared mental life in late antique Christianity. In doing so, it contributes directly to the broader aims of the GroupMinds project by extending the investigation of collective cognition and emotion into early Christian intellectual and pastoral contexts.

We warmly congratulate Dr Tzortzopoulou on this significant achievement!