A reminder that, due to my holiday in Greece, podcast episodes of Life Sentences won’t resume until next Sunday 20 October.
A loyal subscriber commented on a previous post:
I find it fascinating how much the Fathers seem to be articulating (what we would now call) a theory of mind as much as anything else. Taking the science of the soul, i.e. psychology, back to its roots.
Absolutely so. If there’s one thing I’d like Life Sentences to get across to listeners and readers, it’s that the Fathers of the Church were neither know-nothings nor mere dogmatists. The Christianity they practised—and which they passed down to us through their writings, yes, but first and foremost through the Church’s living tradition when understood correctly—aims at true knowledge grounded in experience.
If their understanding of what constitutes true knowledge differs from how we commonly understand knowledge today, well, that’s down to the different axiomatic beliefs that underlay their thinking compared to ours. In my view, these differences can be boiled down to one fundamental disagreement. Whereas we take it as given that a human being is essentially a body, the Fathers took it as equally given that a human being is essentially a mind.
We think of ourselves as primarily a material complex of bodily processes: gestation, homeostasis, metabolism, respiration, digestion, excretion, reproduction, and so on, biological mechanisms that somehow give rise to a subjective experience of personal selfhood and rational consciousness which is more or less illusory. The Fathers, however, thought of themselves as primarily a spiritual simplex of mental powers: consciousness, intuition, contemplation, memory, imagination, will, deliberation, intention, and so on, which, though in some way multiple, are in essence unified within a single noetic and ultimately transcendent substance, the mind, to which a separate substance, the body, is intimately affiliated, the nature of that affiliation being most often understood on analogy with that of an artisan to his tool.
We are a piece of meat that happens to be thinking; they were a spiritual ray of intelligence passing from pure rationality into sense perception through the prism of the material body. And the Fathers won’t make any sense until you learn to inhabit yourself as they inhabited themselves, as a mind possessing a body. Which is why I’m always banging on about it. You are a mind. You are not a body. You have a body. Your mind is primary, your body secondary. You are not a body first which then learns how to know. You are a mind first which then knows through a body.
Consider what that means. Believing that you are a body, when it dies, you die—or so you think. Believing that you are a mind, when the body dies, you…what? The most you can say is, now lacking a means of sense perception, you are no longer able to perceive sense-perceptible reality. But since you are not a body, when the body dies, you do not die.
Imagine you’re in hospital visiting a dying man. You sit beside his bed holding his hand, the beep beep beep of the heart monitor gradually slowing down, until beeeeeeeeeeeep, and he’s…what? Dead? Or just gone? Empirically all you’ve witnessed is a body dying. How you imagine what that means for the man himself depends entirely on which of those two axioms you hold about what it is to be a human being.
You may think you have no good reason to believe that he is anything more than a body, because that is all you can see with your eyes. But the Fathers would say that’s because you have committed the grave mental error of identifying with sense-perception and becoming attached to objects of sense-perception. They themselves, having purified their minds from all attachment to objects of sense-perception, perceive purely intelligible reality with the same clarity and force as you perceive sense-perceptible reality—indeed, with greater clarity and force. If you don’t perceive the purely intelligible, that’s on you, a consequence of the way you’ve lived your life: of the moral choices you’ve made and the degree to which you’ve succumbed, via the pleasure principle, to immersion in sense perception only.
It is extremely hard, and requires great discipline, not to identify with the body. Achieving that disidentification is one of the aims of Christian ascetic practice, both bodily and mental, for learning to inhabit yourself properly, as a mind with a body and not the other way around, is an important step on the way to coming to know God, to the degree that is possible. This is so because man is made in the image of God.
The Fathers interpreted that doctrine to indicate an analogy between our own being as immortal, intelligent minds and the being of God. As St Basil clearly stated: ‘What we are is soul and a nous made in the image of the One who created us… A precise understanding of yourself will provide you sufficient guidance even toward the knowledge of God.’ We’ve been emphasising the human side of the analogy, that you are a nous irradiated by the light of logos and living a spiritual life. But the Fathers—while always bearing in mind that the correspondence of one side of the analogy to the other is not exact because of the ultimate incommensurability between the created and the uncreated—are perfectly happy to take up the divine side of the analogy. As in this illustrative quote by St Maximus the Confessor:
Mystical theology teaches us to know God as a single unoriginate Nous, self-existent, the begetter of a single, self-existent, unoriginate Logos, and the source of a single everlasting life, self-existent as the Holy Spirit: a Trinity in Unity and a Unity in Trinity.
Nous, logos, and spirit are words drawn from the created side of that divide (for minds, intelligences, and breaths or winds are all created things) and applied analogically to the uncreated side, in this case to elucidate the Holy Trinity, the supreme dogma of the Christian faith.
As Life Sentences proceeds, the Fathers will take us further into the mysterious correspondence between the human mind and the Holy Trinity.
Along the same vein, another subscriber once wrote to me:
Ultimately I am a mortal container so when I die the image [of God] will die with me. Immortality means the image [of God] is imprinted into the divine somehow.
This is how I replied:
You are making two errors there. First, it is not true that you are ultimately ‘a mortal container’. The Church teaches that each human being is an immortal soul, an immortal soul which, for now, animates a fleshly and thus a mortal body—but which body, at the resurrection, will be transformed or reconstituted as spiritual and immortal too. So though your fleshly body will die, what you are, your soul, will not die, and will eventually be reunited with that body, renewed and made immortal. The state of the postmortem soul, between the body's death and its resurrection in glory—whether she be asleep, or awake and in pain, or awake and in blessedness—the Church does not clearly define; it may vary widely depending on the degree of holiness that soul has attained during this life. However, that you are immortal is an absolutely crucial doctrine of Christianity, as is the doctrine of the resurrection, which is to say, you're not just immortal, you're destined for immortal glory. (This contrasts with a certain pagan view which also affirmed the immortal soul but believed its destiny lay in an unendingly sad, forgetful, shadowy state in Hades.) So immortality is not dependent upon something added to your human nature. It is your human nature. Immortality is not a gift we are waiting to be given; we have been given it.
In fact (and here is your second error) far from the divine image in which you were created being something other than yourself which you receive from outside, just as you are your immortal soul, so are you made in the image of God: your soul is theomorphic by nature, which is why it is, like God, immortal. The Fathers teach that every man born into the world receives his being in the image of God and that nothing, absolutely nothing, can change that fact. Certainly not the death of the body! So it is simply wrong to conceptualise these spiritual realities as ‘when I die, the image will die with me.’ The image will die? Certainly not! How could it? The image of God in which we have been created is Christ Himself! The One who lives eternally in the bosom of the Father!—as do we, in Him.
The Fathers say that not even sin, which begins with the darkening of the mind and ends with immoral actions, abolishes or destroys the divine image in which we were created. For sin cannot touch or harm or pollute Christ! This is why even the gravest sinner deserves the same love that we owe to God Himself. No, sin merely obscures or blots or covers over that image, and so, after baptism, which initiates and effects our regeneration, our works of virtue aim not at acquiring the divine image, which is ours by inviolate right, but at cleansing it, polishing it, making it shine ever more brightly, more clearly reflecting the divine likeness.
When you look at a man, you are seeing the divine image, full stop. The question is, what is the likeness? Is it very smudged? Sketchy? Finely drawn? Beautifully coloured? You see what I mean. As when you can tell that a drawing of someone is an image of that person but not a very good likeness, so are you and I sinners who, though we ‘look like’ God (i.e. are in His image), the likeness isn’t very clear. People look at us and say, ‘Well, I can tell those are a couple of gods over there, but to look at them, I couldn’t tell you much about the divine nature.’
When I read what you wrote, my heart broke a little bit, because your words felt to me filled with, at best, a kind of resigned hopefulness, not a lively faith in the promises, that what is promised is real: we are immortal gods, created in our Creator’s image, and though we die like men, and for a time lie asleep in the Lord, we will be reborn in glory, aflame at last, each one of us finally realising the burning holy idea which God the Father has been conceiving of us in His eternal wisdom from before the ages.
Thanks for the post, and the extended reply to my comment.
I’ve got some listening to catch up on so perhaps you have explained this, but my Protestant-formed ears struggle to square “you are a mind” with “you are not a mortal container”. I end up thinking of Descartes’ “ghost in the shell” and how destructive that has been for modernity - the severing of humans from the natural world, the conception of the mind in mechanical terms, and a great divide set between body and spirit.
I understand that sense-perception is not wicked, rather clouded, but that still doesn’t quite feel enough. Christ’s conjoining of the two natures seems to elevate materiality (in my limited understanding of John of Damascus), and this elevation has something to do with 1 Cor. 15’s “seed raised spiritual”. Probably part of the problem comes from seeing “spiritual” as immaterial woo-woo (see Descartes) and “material” as the solid facts of this world. Which of course the Scriptures reject - God is eternal and pre-material, and the stuff of this world is passing away. But you can’t teach an old dog a new phronema.
I realise the Fathers aren’t speaking to French philosophers or modern Evangelical concerns about Gnosticism, but I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.
A true, important, and necessary understanding of being made in the image and likeness of God.
The stereotyping conflict of humanity isn't solved by making gender fluid, biologically malleable, and behavior modified by computer or DNA modeling/molding. We're each unique, but we are man or woman, fragile in a broken world, and only marginally here transformed by the creator. We peek at the Kingdom even as we unwittingly ruin where we now reside. All will be restored.
This is the shortest part of our eternity.
Good stuff, Thomas.