Have a bit of nous! Opening our Spiritual Eyes
Preacher: Revd Dr Christopher Knight
Readings: 2 Kings 6:8-17; Ephesians 1:17-23; Luke 11:33-36
It’s not often that people nowadays invoke an ancient Greek philosophical concept but – without knowing that this is what they’re doing – this is precisely what happens, in certain parts of Britain, when people criticise someone else’s lack of common sense. In Yorkshire, in particular, you’ll still often hear someone voice this kind of criticism by saying, “Ee lad” – or lass, as the case may be – “have a bit of nous.” This last word, nous – when pronounced in the Yorkshire way, to rhyme with mouse – simply reflects an old-fashioned British pronunciation of a Greek word, which is spelled N-O-U-S. In modern Greek and in theological and philosophical circles, however, this word is now usually pronounced to rhyme, not with mouse, but with moose.
This use of the term nous to mean “common sense” does pick up one aspect of what ancient philosophers meant when they used this word, but this was not the main thing that they had in mind. These philosophers were talking primarily about a mental faculty that they believed exists, at least potentially, in all of us: a faculty that enables us to perceive intuitively what is true or real. Although different nuances of this aspect of the nous were emphasized in different philosophical schools of thought, the term was common enough among Greek speakers of the ancient and late antique world to be used by non-philosophers in their everyday speech. In the Greek of the New Testament, for example, it was used quite often in the letters of St. Paul.
Here, though, there is a problem for modern New Testament readers because most of them are unable to read the texts in the original Greek and, even if they do have the linguistic ability to do so in a rough and ready fashion, they may still be unfamiliar with all the subtleties of Greek usage. As with a number of other Greek words used in the New Testament, our common translations from Greek into English sometimes fail to indicate all the nuances of a word’s meaning. There is in fact a particular problem with translating the word nous because, in New Testament translations, it is often translated as “mind”, while in philosophical texts – largely because early translations into Latin rendered it as intellectus – it is more often translated as “intellect”. Neither of these modern translations into English does justice, however, to the way in which the Greek word nous refers to an essentially intuitive capacity, and not to what the terms mind or intellect usually mean in modern English, in which both these terms are seen as referring primarily to the source of discursive rationality.
So what is the full meaning of the term nous? The nous was seen, in the ancient and late antique worlds, as what gives rise to what was called our noetic apprehension of reality – an intuitive apprehension that is quite distinct from the apprehension that arises from sense observation and reflection on that observation using our discursive rational capacity. This distinction – more obvious in Greek vocabulary than in English- is an interesting one because it is only fairly recently that a comparable distinction has become common among us once again, largely because of our current scientific knowledge of the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain. Through the work of the Scottish scholar, Iain McGilchrist, in particular, we are becoming increasingly aware of the way in which, in our present culture, we attribute great value to the capacities that arise from the left hemisphere of the brain – our quantitative and analytical capacities – but tend to attribute little value to the capacities that arise from the right hemisphere, which are related to creativity, emotion and intuition.
It cannot be said that the right hemisphere capacities that McGilchrist describes correspond exactly to the capacities that the ancient Greeks ascribed to the nous. There are, nevertheless, considerable overlaps between the two understandings so that, if we take McGilchrist seriously, we need to think about how the concept of the nous was used by our early Christian forebears and to ask whether ignoring its implications seriously unbalances our modern Christian thinking and experience. I believe that this lack of balance does exist in our Christian community, not least because when we examine the use of the term nous in the early Christian centuries, we find that the noetic apprehension arising from the full use of the nous was seen by many of our Christian forebears as central to what they called theōria: the contemplation of God (and also of creation, which they sometimes saw as an essential preliminary to the contemplation of God.) The nous was seen by them, in fact, as what some of them called the “eye of the soul”, and it was understood as something quite distinct from the capacity for discursive reasoning. In our modern Christian community, by contrast, this “eye of the soul” is frequently ignored.
My own sense of the importance of this nous concept does not, we should perhaps note, arise only from the way in which I have become increasingly aware of its continuing use in the Eastern Orthodox Church since I transferred my allegiance to Orthodoxy from the Scottish Episcopal Church in which I was originally ordained. My initial sense of the importance of the nous concept arose also from two other things.
One of these was the academic pursuit that had already been central to much of my thinking for many years before that transfer of allegiance. This pursuit is what was then usually called the “science-theology dialogue” but in more recent times has more often been referred to as “science-engaged theology”. Anyone interested in seeing how the nous concept fits into that strand of theological thinking can find my own thoughts on this in my book, Science and the Christian Faith. However, it’s worth noting that my initial motivation for exploring the nous concept arose not only from science-engaged theology but also from something quite different. This was my pastoral interest in the question of how we might understand the relationship to God of those suffering from cognitive incapacities such as those associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Although I did not write about this issue when I started thinking about the nous concept– and indeed have not written anything about it since that time – I have been delighted that this Alzheimer’s question has been addressed in recent years from the perspective of what is sometimes called “disability theology”.
I have been particularly impressed by the way in which the Scottish theologian and Presbyterian minister, John Swinton, has approached this issue. In his book, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God, Swinton has argued, on Biblical grounds, that human beings are more than their cognitive capacities or the web of social relationships they establish throughout their lives. We are, he argues, persons, and the loss of cognitive capacities and social relationships in old age does not, he insists, diminish what is most important about personhood. For him, the important thing is, from a theological perspective, that our personhood arises from the biblical understanding of the “breath of God” (nephesh) that is, according to the Book of Genesis (2:7; 6:17; 7:22), breathed into all living beings. Our true identity, Swinton argues, is found in God, and it will be revealed to us fully only in the “world to come”. The spiritual identity with which we are endowed by God is, he suggests, not lost in dementia. Rather, it continues to exist in God even when what we usually regard as the sum of our cognitive abilities and our web of human relationships have been lost.
Swinton’s account may, I believe, be expanded in terms of the concept of the nous of which I have spoken, and this possibility has been underlined for me very recently by a paper that I was asked to referee by another disability theologian, Petre Malcan, who works within my own Eastern Orthodox tradition and therefore is more aware of the nous concept than Swinton seems to be. His linking of Swinton’s perspectives to the nous concept has made me look, once again, at the way in which that concept is still used within the theological tradition within which both he and I work, underlining the way in which, for us and for many other Christians of the East, the nous should be seen as in some sense what truly links the human mind to the “mind of God”.
All these issues might, of course, seem to the ordinary Christian to be of interest only to those involved in academic theological discussion or in caring for the cognitively impaired. However, I believe that two things should prevent us from thinking in this way and to see that what is pointed to by the nous concept is vital to all of us.
One of these things is the fact that – as one commentator has noted of Iain McGilchrist’s analysis – “the crucial point at issue is not a neurological one, but what we might call a psycho-ethical or spiritual one: that our ultimate flourishing as human beings depends on our being able to integrate our detached and analytic modes of relating to the world with our more direct and intuitive modes of awareness.” If I am correct, therefore, in seeing the concept of the nous as a valuable one in expanding McGilchrist’s kind of analysis, the issue is not merely one of understanding brain functioning. It is also (as McGilchrist himself stresses) one that has important implications for our basic psychic health and spiritual wholeness. And, as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, I cannot help but see this perspective as related to what my own tradition sees as the necessity of going beyond discursive thinking in relation to our faith and developing the contemplative, intuitive apprehension that arises from the enlightened nous – a process that early Christian thinkers often described as “drawing the mind into the heart”.
Another thing that suggests the importance of the nous is the way in which the Orthodox understanding of its function – as the “eye of the soul” – clearly reflects the way in which the Biblical documents frequently speak about opening what we might call our “spiritual eyes”. From the Psalmist’s “Open my eyes that I may behold the wondrous things of thy law (Ps. 119:18) to the sense, in the Epistle to the Ephesians, of the need for the “eyes of [our] hearts” to be “enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18) this notion of fully opening our spiritual eyes – of healing our spiritual blindness or blurred sight –is central to the Biblical understanding of our Christian vocation, and may also have implications for a number of issues that may not immediately be obvious, such as the relationship between the faith traditions of the world and the nature of what we Christians describe as eternal life.
We need to ask, however, whether it may be that some Christian traditions can see the validity of these insights into the “eye of the soul” with greater clarity than do others, and whether we can learn from one another in this respect. This possibility arises because, as Christians, we inevitably reflect on the instinctive spiritual wisdom provided by the nous through the lens provided by the myth of the “Fall” set out in the second and third chapters of the Book of Genesis, and precisely how we see the “fallenness” of our human nature will affect our judgement of how we are to understand the contemplation of God through the nous.
In relation to this issue, it is important, I believe, to recognize that there is a difference between how many Christians in the West have seen the Fall and how my own Eastern Orthodox tradition sees it. This difference is largely due to the influence in the West of the late fourth and early fifth century writer, Augustine of Hippo, and of the later “Augustinianism” that represented an attempt to systematize his views. This Augustinianism – never influential in the Christian East – was extremely influential in creating in the West a very pessimistic view of our “fallen” human condition, expressed in terms of a notion of original sin that was subtly but significantly different to the comparable Eastern Christian notion of ancestral sin.
One thing to remember here is that the Augustinian view of original sin became “standard” in the West only slowly, so that its pessimism about the human condition contrasts markedly with the strand of Christian thinking that was often found in both East and West during the early centuries of our faith. (Indeed, even after its formulation, it was unknown or criticized by many in the West for a considerable period. It is unlikely, for example, that the great Welshman, St. Patrick of Ireland, who is celebrated today, knew anything of the particular version of original sin developed by Augustine, even though they lived at much the same time.)
Augustinian pessimism about the “fallen” human condition reached its height only much later, in fact, in countries like Scotland, where Calvinism was particularly influential. John Calvin, as is well known, had a strong sense that an intrinsic “sense of divinity” (sensus divinitatis) exists in fallen human beings as part of our created nature, but he believed also that this capacity should be understood through the filter of his own expansion of the Augustinian understanding of original sin. He declared, in fact, that fallen human beings should be seen as suffering from utter depravity. (This term is admittedly, sometimes misunderstood in the way that it was in the old joke, which I heard in my Scottish Episcopalian days, in which it was said that the Presbyterians looked down on us because, although we admitted in our Episcopalian Liturgy that we were “miserable sinners”, they could go one better by insisting that they themselves were not merely “miserable sinners” but were also “utterly depraved”.) Even when we take into account the subtlety of what Calvin meant, however, utter depravity means, for the strict Calvinist, something that no Orthodox could ever affirm without qualification: that although an intrinsic “sense of divinity” exists as an aspect of our created being, there is – as Calvin himself put it – no one in whom this sense of divinity “ripens” and it is, in fact, so corrupted in fallen humanity that “by itself it produces only the worst fruit”.
What does all this mean for the practice and understanding of the ordinary Christian? There are two things that I should like to stress in relation to this question. One relates to the concept of faith. We often seem to think that having faith means being able to affirm with sincerity some set of propositions about God in a kind of box-ticking manner; (incarnation – tick; atonement – tick; and so on.) This, however, fails to appreciate the nuances of another word used in the Greek in which the New Testament was written. This is the word that is usually, in English translations, rendered as “faith”. However, what this Greek term pistis means, at the fundamental level, is not assent to a set of propositions about God but trust in the reality to which those supposed propositions point.
As one modern scholar has commented of the understanding of faith to be found in the writings of one of the great Christian writers of the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa, this understanding is clearly linked to the concept of the nous. For Gregory, our Christian spiritual path is not one of assenting ever more firmly to various propositions about God, but one in which we eventually – as he puts it – abandon “every form of comprehension” because God is increasingly known in a noetic manner that transcends the propositions of systematic theology. For Gregory, religious language can never circumscribe the reality to which it points, and it is contemplation rather than the use of words that marks out the higher stages of our spiritual path.
This kind of perspective on the use of religious language leads us to the second practical point that I’d like to make. This is that, for the tradition within which I work and live, it is essential that we recognize, with Gregory, that the concepts we form “in accordance with the understanding and the judgement which are natural to us, basing ourselves on an intelligible representation, create idols of God instead of revealing to us God Himself.” As the great 20th century Orthodox theologian, Vladimir Lossky, has put it, the terms that we apply to God in our theological discourse are not to be seen as “rational notions which we formulate, the concepts with which our intellect constructs a positive science of the divine nature”. Rather, he says, they are “images or ideas intended to guide us and fit our faculties for the contemplation of that which passes all understanding.” This means, he says, that Christian dogma is something that should be approached “in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically.”
This kind of stress on what is often called “mystical theology” takes us beyond the kind of framework – common among Western theologians – in which mystical theology, if it is not ignored altogether, is just a “branch” of theology that can be explored by those to whom it is of interest, in much the same way as they might have chosen instead to explore disability theology or feminist theology or any of the other “theologies” that are now proliferating in the academic world. These branches of theology may, admittedly, sometimes be very significant for our understanding, but “mystical theology” is not, or at least should not, be a “branch” of this kind. Rather, mystical theology – at least for my own tradition – is the overarching framework within which theology of any sort is pursued, and its findamental insights are as essential to simple believers as they are to academic theologians because they are based, not simply on the kinds of verbally-expressed ideas that the latter group loves to explore, but on the spiritual experience to which all Christians are called.
A true theologian, in this sense, is not simply someone who possesses a great deal of knowledge about a religious tradition coupled with the analytical ability to use this knowledge in an interesting way. Rather, according to an old Orthodox saying, a true theologian is “one who prays.” This doesn’t, of course, mean simply saying prayers. It means, rather, that true theologians are people who have consistently and consciously lived in the presence of God and have, as a result, undergone what Lossky calls a “profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit.” Academic theologians may or may not have experienced this change and, if they haven’t, they are no more than what some strands of the Hindu tradition call pundits: people who know a great deal about a religious tradition but do not know it in the deep way that can only come from noetic experience. Those who do have this deeper experience are, by contrast, more than pundits; they are – in the Hindu vocabulary – gurus: people who speak from the depths of their spiritual experience.
As one of the Hindus who has stressed this distinction once asked, “What would you think of men who went into an orchard, and bruised themselves counting the leaves, the size of the twigs, the number of branches, and so forth, while only one of them had the sense to begin to eat the mangoes?” The answer, he suggests, leads to a simple conclusion: that one should “leave this counting of leaves and twigs, and this note taking to others. That work has its own value in its proper place, but not here, in the spiritual realm. Men never become spiritual through such work; you have never once seen a strong spiritual man among these ‘leaf counters’.”
This attitude corresponds closely, I think, to the Orthodox sense that true theologians are those who have fully opened the spiritual eyes that all of us possess but in practice often keep closed or at least half closed. True theologians, in this sense of the term, are what we should all strive to become: people whose spiritual sight has been fully restored. They are, quite simply, those who have acquired something what we should all strive to possess through the grace of God: what we can properly call – in an expansion of its Yorkshire meaning – “a bit of nous.”