Revealing the nous

Some initial thoughts on repentance

We began with Leo the Great invoking Christ’s initial clarion call, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is near! Repent!’ And so, heeding Christ’s call, at the very outset of Life Sentences we placed before our mind’s eye two foundational spiritual concepts: the Kingdom of Heaven and repentance. As we’ve seen, both concepts require careful unpacking, and in this post, I’m going to begin to explore repentance.

Notice what I wrote: I’m going to begin to explore. Life Sentences will never exhaust the mystery of repentance, certainly not in a single post. As I said back in episode 1:

St Leo’s call to fast, to turn the mind away from objects of sense perception, to resist the soul’s inclination to desire objects of sense perception—that whole programme of asceticism is meaningless if it’s outside the context of worshipping God. You’re turning away from passionate attachment to objects of sense perception in order to turn towards God. And what that means, to turn to God, is really what this podcast is all about. Because it is what is meant by Christ’s command to ‘repent’, metanoia in Greek, which literally means ‘change (or turn) the mind’.

So yes, the Greek for repentance is metanoia, ‘changing the mind’, from meta, ‘change’, and nous, ‘mind’. When I introduced the concept of nous in episode 3, I said it was difficult to define, and settled on ‘mind’ as a translation, but with provisos. In that same episode, Basil the Great called the nous ‘the eye of the soul’. This indicates that the nous involves less a kind of thinking and more a kind of seeing.

This is obviously not an image of the nous. The nous is invisible.

Nous is indeed hard to define. When I was a young man, I lived for a time on Mount Athos in northern Greece, in one of the peninsula’s twenty Orthodox monasteries. My obedience was to work in the refectory, washing tables, sweeping floors, and chopping vegetables. The refectory boss was Father N., the most senior member of the brotherhood, more senior even than the abbot, and yet from his outward behaviour you easily could have mistaken him for a bit of a monastic miscreant. His clothes were dishevelled and he would often joke around with me and my fellow novices. When you got to know him, however, you realised that Father N. was the real deal. 

One day, while we sat peeling garlic cloves together, I asked Father N. a question. ‘Pater, what is the nous?’

I’d encountered the word in spiritual texts, and had read descriptions of it, which were usually as tentative and inconclusive as the ones I’ve provided. Now I wanted to learn what the nous was from an experienced man of prayer.

Father N. considered the question carefully. As I waited, I watched a fly crawl across his face, which if he even noticed it he didn’t bat away. After this pause, his eyes started to gleam and he ventured an answer. His English wasn’t great and my Greek was even worse, so he answered using hand gestures only.

First he raised both hands in the air. Holding them up either side of his head, fingers twinkling, he began to move his hands round in circles while swivelling his eyes back and forth. He was clearly parodying ordinary thinking, which is often half-conscious, only partly intentional, and largely chaotic.

Then he shook his head. Nous was not that.

After a moment, he adopted a severer expression and narrowed his eyes. Raising his hands once again, this time to his temples, he touched the tips of his two pointer fingers together, making what could have been mistaken for a bull’s horns, his fingers forming a triangle whose base spanned his eyebrows and whose apex extended outward from the centre of his forehead. Meanwhile he lowered his head while fixing his eyes firmly on the apex of the triangle. This new gesture conveyed intense focus and singularity of vision. The chaotic or haphazard activity of ordinary thinking was gone.

That is nous, his wordless gesture was saying. No thinking, just seeing. Seeing with the single eye of the soul.

Was Father N.’s lesson particularly helpful? I cannot remember. You’ll be shocked to read that I was intensely intellectual at the time. My mind was absolutely flooded with thinking. So, though I twigged what Father N. was saying, I’m not sure I was in any position to understand it, and I may even have bristled a little bit at his suggestion that thinking was somehow a problem—thinking as I experienced it, at any rate.

A few months later, something happened to change that. It was 26 October 2002, the feast of St Demetrius. During the all-night vigil for the feast, while intensely praying the Jesus Prayer, repeating it for hours on end, a shift took place inside of me. My thinking was revealed. Not the thoughts, but the thinking itself became blindingly clear. I was looking at my thinking. It was as if my soul had taken a big step back and could now clearly and objectively see the thinking that, up until then, it had been submerged in.

My thinking is not myself, I realised. Rather, what I am is whatever it is that is looking at my thinking.

How to describe this? Imagine you’re in a bathtub taking a shower, standing directly underneath a streaming jet of hot water. It envelops your body, warming the skin, stimulating it so much that you can’t really tell where the water ends and where your own body begins—and then you take a big step backwards, out of the streaming water and into the cold, dry end of the tub. Suddenly your experience completely changes. The stream now lies before you, splattering directly onto the bathtub. Whereas before you only felt the water—or in fact, you’d felt not the water itself as much as, via the water’s warmth, you’d felt your own body—now you can see the water clearly.

That’s how that experience at the all-night vigil felt. For my entire life up until that moment, I had been submerged in my thoughts, in my thinking. So much so that I thought thinking was all that I subjectively was. Objectively I was a body, and subjectively I was thinking. My whole sense of self was both constructed out of thinking and maintained by thinking. However, at that vigil, that all changed. Now I was a seeing. Now I was a nous. And with that realisation, my power of seeing massively increased, especially my power of seeing my thoughts. I soon realised that my thoughts were now so clear that, with attention, I could see them before I actually thought them.

At the time it seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. And I can tell you, my ego rushed right in, taking great pride in having been granted such an unprecedented, miraculous self-revelation. Now of course I know what happened is normal for anyone practising focused meditation of any kind for the first time. It wasn’t miraculous or special at all. The nous is a perfectly natural faculty of the human soul—in fact it is ‘the governing faculty of the soul’, in Basil’s words—and so becoming aware of oneself as a nous and not as a stream of thoughts is perfectly natural.

However, if metanoia means ‘change the nous’; and if nous is the mental faculty whereby, through intense focus, we perceive what we see; and furthermore, if nous is the part of the soul with which we are most properly identified, then we’re getting closer to an idea of what true repentance might mean.

You can be sure, this will be explored further over the course of Life Sentences.