The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious

The Western Soul Did Not Lose Its Feeling — It Lost the Grammar That Made Feeling Speakable

Cody Peterson’s The Abolished Middle advances a thesis so architecturally ambitious it risks being mistaken for metaphor when it is, in fact, mechanical: the modern inability to endure suffering, to generate value from loss, and to feel the sacred is not a moral failure but a syntactical one. The argument turns on the Greek Middle Voice — the grammatical category in which the subject is situated interior to the process, neither commanding from above (Active) nor collapsed beneath (Passive) but constituted by the action itself. Peterson traces the erosion of this voice from its full vitality in Homer through Plato’s demotion of the thumos, the Johannine identification of the Divine with Logos, and finally its legislative abolition at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 869 AD. The book’s originality lies not in identifying any one of these stations — Hillman flagged the Council’s role decades ago — but in demonstrating that they form a single, continuous forensic trail. When Émile Benveniste described the Middle Voice subject as “interior to the process” and Roland Barthes specified that such a subject “affects himself in acting,” they were describing the exact operation Peterson locates in the Homeric thumos: the organ of felt valuation that asks, “How does my interior self stand in relation to this? What is this worth to my soul?” The loss of this grammatical category did not merely impoverish expression; it rendered the thumos’s mode of being “first unspeakable, then unfelt, and finally unthinkable.”

The Peisomai Identity Reveals That Suffering and Persuasion Are the Same Operation

The argumentative climax of the book is a piece of philological forensics that deserves to stand alongside the best work in depth-psychological hermeneutics. Peterson demonstrates that the future middle of paschō (“to suffer”) — peisomai — is morphologically identical to the future middle of peithō (“to persuade”). This is not accidental homophony. The Greek language “aggressively selected” for this convergence, bending the trajectory of suffering until it merged with the trajectory of persuasion. The implications are staggering: to genuinely suffer is to be persuaded by reality into a new shape; to be genuinely persuaded is to have admitted a force into the thumos that rearranges the subject from within. Peterson then pairs paschō with tlaō (“to endure”), arguing that they form a single suppletive engine of value-creation: paschō opens the intake valve; tlaō provides the tensile containment that prevents the vessel from shattering. Without intake, nothing enters; without containment, what enters destroys. The forged soul is the alloy. This mechanical account of character-formation — Intake + Containment = Constitution — gives rigorous structural backing to what Hillman intuited when he described feeling as “the function of relationship.” It also reframes the First Step of Alcoholics Anonymous (“We admitted we were powerless”) as a precise Middle Voice operation: the alcoholic does not surrender to the substance (Passive) but surrenders to the reality of the condition (Middle), ceasing the Active war of the Imperial Will and allowing convergence to do its constitutive work. Here Peterson’s earlier book, The Iron Thumos, and its analysis of addiction through Jungian and mythological lenses finds its full grammatical articulation.

Canon 11 Was a Collision of Grammars, Not a Theological Dispute

Peterson’s treatment of the Fourth Council of Constantinople transforms what is usually a footnote in intellectual history into the central crime scene of Western psychology. The Council’s Canon 11, defining the human subject as possessing “one rational and intellectual soul” (unam animam rationabilem et intellectualem), is typically read as a theological ruling against dualist heresy. Peterson reads it as a grammatical event. The conflict between Photius, the Greek-speaking Patriarch who still had access to the Middle Voice as a living category, and the Latin-speaking Roman legates who had already lost it, was a collision of entire worlds of psychic possibility. Photius was defending the trichotomy (body / thumos / nous) that his grammar still supported; the Latins were enforcing a binary their language demanded. The thumos “was not argued out of existence; it was not disproven or refuted. It was legislated out of existence by a council whose Latin speakers literally could not say what they were abolishing.” This is the most provocative historical claim in the book, and Peterson earns it by showing the downstream consequences: the soul became a Monarchy rather than a Parliament, internal dialogue was reclassified as insubordination, and resistance from the chest became sin rather than counsel. The political utility was immense — Rome needed the soul’s structure to mirror the Imperial juridical structure — but the psychic cost was the abolition of the organ that made eusebeia (right relation to the sacred) structurally possible.

Jung Reconstructed the Thumos Without the Original Grammar

Peterson positions Jung not as a therapist but as the first modern figure to attempt the retrieval of the abolished middle. Jung’s insistence on the “reality of the psyche” as a tertium quid — distinct from both abstract spirit and biological body — was, in Peterson’s framing, an attempt to reconstruct the thumos without possessing the grammatical tools that originally housed it. Active Imagination is nothing less than a resurrection of the dielexato formula: the hero, deeply vexed, turning inward to consult the thumos as a partner in deliberation rather than an object to be analyzed or a force to be possessed by. Hillman’s formulation esse in anima (“being in soul”) captures the stance the Latin delegates at Constantinople could not fathom — existence interior to the process. But Peterson, in his boldest move, proposes a complementary inversion: anima in esse (“soul in being” or “soul as substance”). Soul is not merely a perspective or hermeneutic lens; it is a substance forged by convergence, possessing “weight, density, texture — the heavy, permanent mass of character.” This reversal grounds Hillman’s archetypal psychology in a physics of transformation that Hillman himself never fully articulated.

For anyone encountering depth psychology today — particularly those navigating addiction, grief, or the hollow oscillation between therapeutic self-help and spiritual bypass — The Abolished Middle provides something no other book in the field offers: a mechanical account of why modern culture cannot hold suffering long enough for it to become anything. It names the specific grammatical, theological, and philosophical operations that sealed the thumos shut, and it identifies convergence — the simultaneous pressure of permanent loss, radical uncertainty, and utter powerlessness — as the crucible that reopens the Middle Voice whether we have the syntax for it or not. The grammar is lost, Peterson concludes, but the physics remains. Wherever a mortal vessel holds what cannot be discharged, the thumos forges itself again.