At the moment, perhaps, this blog is a way for me to come to a better understanding of certain points which are still a bit unclear or fuzzy around the edges for me. Commenters like Romanos are especially helpful! Over the years my various psychological profiles have consistently reported that I think in pictures, not words, and that for me to come to understand something which requires words I've got to write it or talk about it. That's what this blog is really for, I guess.
Nous is pronounced in proper modern academic Greek as 'noose', but in England among certain groups of people who use it in everyday speech it's pronounced 'naowss'. I prefer the latter pronunciation, for a reason which will become clear in this post, eventually!
The term Nous designates the limpid primordial lucidity which prexists sense impressions or intellection. The Nous is like a perfectly pure crystal, which has no color of its own, but within which the color and shapes of the surrounding environment appear. In a temporal sense it's mediated by the brain and receives information from the senses.
The sense of a separate 'I' isn't really an aspect of the Nous itself, but rather it's an organizing function of the intellect utilized to effectively marshall sense perceptions into a coherent pragmatic structure. In other words, your sense of a discrete and separate self is a key function which enables you to eat, walk around, not run into walls, and so forth. However, it's merely a function like any other. The sense of self is not the be-all and end all of life which some people mistake it for.
To repeat: the sense of an I is a merely a function like sight, sound, taste, touch, hearing, perhaps intuition, and the like. The sense of self is important, as is any of the body's sensing functions. But to think that the I is the whole point of living is to make the most serious of mistakes. Then the I becomes something to be protected and defended at all costs, and everything outside of the I's ambit becomes a potential but necessary casualty of the I's wars of conquest and defense. The death of the body then becomes the ultimate outrage, and something to be avoided at all costs. I sometimes see this problem crop up in the lives of people who have a terminal illness and no real faith in something beyond themselves.
It's all based on a trick of the light, so to speak. You mistake the sense of an I as being the essence or core of who you are, but it's not!
In much of traditional fourth and fifth century Christian spirituality much of the objective of spiritual practice, like subjection of the will to the Abba, one's chosen spiritual teacher, was to reduce as much as possible the I to a more manageable level, so it stopped running wild. The passions engendered by the interaction between the I and the senses were also to be brought into a state subjection (or even nullification) through aescetic practices such as fasting, vigils, psalmody, and manual labor leading to apatheia, or passionlessness. Detaching the I from the passions' rule is the point of classical aesceticism.
The objective of aescetic practice is not mere self-torture or punishment or self pay-back for sinning. If it is, it's a misunderstanding which results in a perversion of aescetism's intent, and not only won't do any good, but instead much harm will result.
I like to read the life stories which, among other things, set forth the austerities of the ancient hermits of the Sinai and Palestine, and the biographies of some of the modern saints of Mount Athos. When I think about them, however, it sort of seems that part of the objective of their aescetical practice was to reduce the body to such a low level of physical energy and heath that apatheia which inevitably results from sheer physical exhaustion!
Today, on the other hand, most people live austerity-free lives, and tiredness is a result of overwork or over indulgence, not spiritual practice.
Today the word apathy is understood as a state of listlessness, but it doesn't have the same meaning as apatheia. Modern apathy is close to the Greek term accedia, or absence of caring. Apatheia is the state of not being ruled by one's passions, which arise from a misplaced love, the interactive eros of the I and sense perceptions.
Look into yourself, deeper than your thoughts, emotions, perceptions, deeper than your sense of self, to the basic awareness which prexists those functions. Mental phenomena seem to spontaneously arise in this clear empty sky. Observing it carefully, thoughts and perceptions appear out of nowhere, float about for a while like clouds, and dissipate like clouds, getting whispier and whispier before vanishing altogether. Pleasure, pain, sweet, sour, sounds, emotions, ideas, conceptions, seem to spontaneously appear. But looking beyond the clouds directly at the Nous itself you can't find anything at all. It's more like space itself - an expanse with no center or edge.
St. Paul understands the human person to be composed of pneuma (breath of life... some people call this Spirit), sarx (body... the physical form), and psyche.
The dictionaries I've consulted seem to define Psyche as:
1. The spirit or soul.
2. The mind functioning as the center of thought, emotion, and behavior and consciously or unconsciously adjusting or mediating the body's responses to the social and physical environment.
This is a REALLY confusing definition! Now, some interpreters think the psyche is the 'soul', whatever that means. Others identify it as the intellect. But surely that second definition can't be right, unless the intellect is something other than that part of the mind which is ideational. If both of the definitions above are simultaneously the case, if the soul and the intellect are the same, some people would have better, more effective souls than other people, which is obviously absurd and contrary to everything every religion teaches.
I am taking a big leap here, friends, but I am thinking that Soul, Psyche and Nous are terms which point to the same experiential phenomenon. Here's the aside which links Nous and Naus. In Greek, Naus is the word for 'boat' or 'ship'. It's where we get the word Navy or Naval from. You see, the Nous is our Naus to God, to the present experience of the Divine in this life.
Simplifying this to an almost heretical extent.... Religion is method. It's how we surround the Nous with the Holy so that the Holy appears within it, together with Christ filling the Nous by God's grace through the power of the Holy Spirit, instead of filling it with a World which is seemingly empty.
Of course God could just fill the Nous spontaneously, but He doesn't seem to work that way very often. We need to do something as well. There's generally (but not invariably) a synergy which exists in the spiritual life.
Some simple notes on the soul:
Plato, who it goes without saying is a vastly greater thinker than I could ever be, considers the Psyche as the essence of who we are, but separates it into three parts:
1. Logos, understood as Nous, mind, or reason (though that's odd, since reason is a brain function)
2. Thymos, emotion
3. Eros, the appetites
Aristotle expanded on Plato's definition of the soul, and split it up differently:
A. Rational
1. Calculative
2. Scientific
B. Irrational
1. Appetitive
2. Vegetative
He also disagreed with his teacher's view that it has a separate existence.
Avicenna, the great Muslim Aristotelian philosopher, set forth the principle that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, but not a goal to be achieved. I recall that Bishop Francis Eric Bloy, Episcopal Church bishop of Los Angeles once told me that what he called 'consciousness' or the soul is something like the other elements which make up who we are, which is to say calcium, phosphorous, iron, oxygen, and so forth. When the body dies, the elements separate from their temporary agglomeration, including our God-given consciousness soul-element.
I'll continue my musings on this subject in next week's Nous/Naus post.
Your "musings" have landed you, as far as I am reading you right, into a correct understanding of νους (which of course, like any other Greek, I pronounce "noose"—for us, almost a pun on the thing we sometimes use to hang ourselves), and not the least bit heretical. What you are trying to express resonates with my inner experience. Your correlation of νους and ναυς (nafs > "ship") is also a meaningful example of non-accidental symphony and a good folk etymology.
ReplyDeleteMother Gavrilía Papayánni repeatedly insisted that she didn't exist. I mean, she said, "When I am with the other, I do not exist." I know exactly what she meant, and I intuit that you do too, from some of the things you said in this post. Although she is more practical than philosophical, I recommend the biography of her (which includes many of her sayings and stories) to your attention, entitled The Ascetic of Love. It has both a somewhat forbidding cover and title, yet it is a book that will make you feel like she is sitting next to you and talking to you when you read it. Like most non-religious Orthodox, her experience of God is self-validating and seen to be authentic just by watching her in action.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, philosophy though they may be, though to me they ring true as life.
Thank you Romanos. Although I've been blessed with having had some very great spiritual teachers it's always necessary to come to understand things personally, almost as if one has discovered it for the first time, which indeed is true, because unless the Nous (for example) is personally seen face-to-face and personally experienced it remains only a rumor of which one has heard. I'll buy Aescetic of Love asap. Thanks for the suggestion!
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