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Ratio Pneuma

Ratio Pneuma

Ratio pneuma — the reason of spirit, the reason of breath — is one of the four ratios of the Seba Method as Peterson formulates it. The compound names a register: the proportion (ratio) appropriate to whatever in the soul is volatile, ascending, kindling, mediating, and pervading. Its substance is πνεῦμα in the Greek sense, spiritus in the Latin, the active breath the Stoics identified with the world-soul (Long & Sedley 1987) and the alchemists embodied in mercurius as spiritus mercurialis, the life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit (Jung 1967).

To reason in the pneumatic ratio is to think with the tradition’s whole apparatus for ascent, kindling, vaporization, and spiritualization. It is the register Edinger codifies as sublimatio — the operation by which what has been created in time is translated into eternity (Edinger 1985). It is the register Plotinus structures hierarchically from psyche through nous to the One. It is the register the tria-prima names mercury, set against sulphur (soul) and salt (body). It is the register Corbin opens into the mundus-imaginalis, where breath becomes the substance of perception.

The ratio is necessary but never sufficient. Hillman’s critique stands: when spirit is imagined as above human life, as fundamentally masculine, as abstracting and distancing, and as pure and uncontaminated, the soul is particularly denigrated (Hillman 1989). Ratio pneuma names a domain of legitimate reasoning; it does not authorize the spiritualism that gains a monopoly and bruises the soul. The Method holds the four ratios together precisely so that each is qualified by the others.

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