Psychopannychy, or Psychopannychism, is a belief that existed in Reformation Europe which the Reformers attacked. Psychopannychy, broken up into psyche ("soul") and pannuchios ("lasting all night"), and means the "all-night sleep of the soul," (i.e., from death to the resurrection and last judgment.) Beginning with John Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Psychopannychians became a group, like the Socinians and, later, the Arminians and Unitarians. The doctrine of psychopannychia has never died out.
Famous historical psychopannychites have included:
- William Tyndale (1484-1536), English Bible translator
- "And ye, in putting them [the departed souls] in heaven, hell and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection...And again, if the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good a case as the angels be ? And then what cause is there of the resurrection ?" - William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (1530)
- Martin Luther (1493-1546), German reformer and Bible translator
- "Salomon judgeth that the dead are a sleepe, and feele nothing at all. For the dead lye there accompting neyther dayes nor yeares, but when they are awaked, they shall seeme to haue slept scarce one minute." - Martin Luther, An Exposition of Salomon's Booke, called Ecclesiastes or the Preacher (translation 1573)
- Luther did not object to soul sleep but did object to those who taught the soul died.
- John Milton (1608-1674), English poet and Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell
- "Inasmuch then as the whole man is uniformly said to consist of body, and soul (whatever may be the distinct provinces assigned to these divisions), I will show, that in death, first, the whole man, and secondly, each component part, suffers privation of life...The grave is the common guardian of all till the day of judgment." - John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana (never published)
- Isaac Newton (1643-1727), English physicist
Present-day defenders of these doctrines include the Seventh Day Adventists, Christadelphians and, in a distorted way, Jehovah's Witnesses.
Opponents of psychopannychism include most Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church. The latter views it as a serious heresy:
Whereas some have dared to assert concerning the nature of the reasonable soul that it is mortal, we, with the approbation of the sacred council do condemn and reprobate all those who assert that the intellectual soul is mortal, seeing, according to the canon of Pope Clement V, that the soul is [...] immortal [...] and we decree that all who adhere to like erroneous assertions shall be shunned and punished as heretics. Fifth Council of the Lateran (1513)