The Mind and Soul: A Conversation

                My mind is my job. Some people take the train to work in the morning, some people the car. Well, I take my cerebrum to work. To be a fruitful academic actually has less to do with being “smart” than one would think, and much more to do with keeping one’s mind in prime working condition for the long hours of writing, researching, learning, teaching and coffee break-taking.  Every now and then, I find myself engrossed in literature about the way the human mind works, about how to harness it and keep it in check. The last few months I have been slowly digesting and mulling over two such works, one by Metropolitan Meletios Webber called Bread, Water, Wine & Oil: an Orthodox Christian Experience of God  and the other by Sr. Verna E. F. Harrison entitled God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Christian Formation. As clearly indicated from the titles of these works, both authors articulate their ideas in the context of Christian theism, and I further add that both occupy clerical positions within the Orthodox Christian Church. Thus, both “Father Mel” and “Sister Verna” explore questions of the mental wholeness from a perspective that takes not only psychology and biology but also spirituality into account. Despite this foundational similarity, however, they seem to come to slightly different conclusions concerning the mind’s relationship to the other aspects of human personhood.

What does it mean to be human? […] It is an all important question, and […] it is not a simple question to answer. Who am I? What am I? None of us can easily say. […] This book aims to show readers that all people have value before God.

These words, excerpted from Met. Kallistos Ware’s forward to God’s Many-Splendored Image, underscore Sister Verna’s driving question behind her theological anthropological work on human identity. She wants to address what it means to be human in a broken, modern world—what it means to be psychosomatic,[1] artistic, creative and relational creatures who are capable of both good and evil through freedom of choice. Her book encapsulates over thirty years of study in patristic and anthropological theology with insights gathered not only from thinkers of the early church, but also from theologians and editors from various leading Orthodox Christian seminaries in North America.  The various chapters of her book center around particular “splendors” possessed by human beings as created in the divine image: freedom, virtues, dignity, embodiment,[2] relationship to nature, artistic and scientific creativity, community. At the heart of these splendors, however, and at the heart of the human person is the mind. The mind, for Sister Verna and many of the church fathers she discusses, the human mind is what allows us to live up in accordance with the divine image by which we have been imprinted. It is also, however, what makes us capable of diverging from that image, and departing from the splendors of human personhood.

                Whereas Sister Verna emphasizes the “splendorous” side of humanity, Father Mel takes his point of departure from the very problem hinted at by her argument: the discrepancy between our capacity for the divine fullness of identity on the one hand, and the stark reality of human actions and motivations on the other. “Something is obviously wrong,” he writes in the first chapter. “God is perfect in Himself, but His creation, the world around us, has some obvious flaws.” He attributes these obvious flaws to misuse of human freedom—both originally, in the garden of Eden, and on a constant basis in individual lives.

This is far from a disconcerting moral tirade against the flaws of humans, however. Father Mel explains that in western culture since the middle ages, when theologians began to emphasize the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Genesis account of creation, the term “human nature” has come to refer to the evil, culpable and sinful inclinations common to all people.[3] In eastern theological traditions, however, the narrative of Adam and Eve is less one of a disobedient act that incurred God’s eternal wrath, and more so a story in which true human nature (divine in origin) became separated from action, thus setting in motion a legacy of fragmentation, disintegration and isolation: Adam and Eve’s actions became fragmented from the divine image within them, when their willful mind departed from their spiritual, God-seeking hearts. As Fr. Mel puts it, this inner fragmentation culminated in the sinful action in the Garden, “vast gaps came to exist between God and man, between heaven and earth, between one person and another, between the genders, and finally even within the human personality itself. Each and every person is internally fragmented and externally isolated from the rest of the world, right down to the ultimate depths of his or her being. Fragmentation within the human personality is observed essentially as the division between the mind and the ‘nous,’ or heart.” This is not meant to explain the problem of evil, but rather a means of conceptualizing and coming to terms with the meaning and consequences of human brokenness.

And so, Fr. Mel’s point of entrance into discussing the human mind is the awareness that it is in the inner person where fragmentation constantly plays itself out. Perhaps this concern for healing inner fragmentation stems from Fr. Mel’s life experiences in addition to becoming a clergy member: he served as a clinical psychologist for a number of years, and also describes himself as a recovering alcoholic.

                But how do both Sr. Verna and Fr. Mel define the “mind”? In both of their conceptions, it is obvious that the mind is no simple organ. For Sr. Verna, it seems the term “mind” corresponds to the highest part of the human soul; for Fr. Mel, however, the mind is that intellectual part of the human person that can easily tyrannize the still small voice of the spiritual center, or the heart.

                Sr. Verna relies on a tripartite model that distinguishes between three hierarchical capacities of the human soul:

1.)    The MIND: cognition, reasoning, moral insight, deliberation and freedom of choice.

2.)    INSTINCTIVE IMPULSES: desire, or impulses that seek to drive the person closer to other things.

3.)    EMOTIONAL IMPULSES (thymos): anger/ assertiveness, or impulses that seek to push things from the person.

This view of the human soul derives strongly from the philosophy of Plato and Neo-Platonism, in which the “parts” of the soul are not “self-enclosed, static entities,” but rather complementary facets of a whole person. Among these three aspects, though, the mind occupies the pinnacle of the soul because it can perceive spiritual reality. The mind is also what is supposed to keeps the instinctive and emotional impulses in check. The problem, for Sr. Verna, is that the harmony and obedience to the mind has become disrupted by humanity’s fallen condition. The consequences of this condition so often give emotions and impulses the leverage to lead us not toward virtues, but toward passions, or temptations that will eventually lead one to sin, which “colors one’s whole state of mind.”  “Sin,” today has a lot of negative connotations, but in the writings of the early church fathers, the reason why passions were to be avoided  was not because they were just “bad” in some kind of constructed sense of moral arbitrariness to make people feel guilty all the time. Rather, passions were harmful because ultimately they spread like a sickness and were thought to induce self-destruction; we become slaves to our desires, limiting our freedom as human beings, and making us further “miss the mark” of the divine Good.

It is on this distinction between the soul and other aspects of the human person or psyche that we see the biggest difference between the writings of Sr. Verna and Fr. Mel. In fact, in explaining the latter’s views, it is helpful to begin by discussing his conception not of the mind but of the heart, which is the term he uses for the Greek word “nous.” In the east, our nous or heart—not the mind--is the center of spiritual awareness. In his view, the mind is hardly a fail-safe generator of calculated, purposeful thought. Though the mind is not evil in itself, its needs, demands, desires, fears and judgments are restless, ceaseless and insatiable. Fr. Mel describes the problems of the mind as such, “When we are not actually using [the mind], it carries on under its own power, behaving as if it were in charge and issuing a constant stream of comments and challenges, almost all of which are negative in character […] because the mind dwells in a land of unrelenting desire and boundless fear, and it attempts to influence us to experience these two areas as our rightful home.” The church fathers and ascetics traditionally refer to this “torrent of thoughts that accompanies our daily life” by the Greek term logismoi, incessant thoughts that are not sinful necessarily, but that demand more and more attention, so that we often become slaves to our worst thought patterns and behavioral habits.

So we have two slightly different problems of the mind on the table, here. On the one hand, Sister Verna thinks the mind must become stronger in order to bring into submission the other impulses of the soul. Fr. Mel, however, essentially thinks the mind must become weaker in submission of the heart, which is the self’s quiet, spiritual center. What do Sister Verna and Father Mel think the solution to these problems of the mind are? I don’t think either of them thinks these difficulties can be “solved,” but they do offer us ideas as to how to become more whole in the midst of ourselves. Both offer a number of ways to combat the excesses of the human mind, and I will focus on one point each raised.

                For Sister Verna, the balance between the parts of the soul must be restored so that our intellect guides our emotions and impulses. In doing so, she draws off of the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, who said that “if reason receives back control over emotions, each of them is transformed into a kind of virtue. Anger produces courage, fear produces obedience, the power of love produces the desire for what is truly beautiful […] Set your minds constantly on things that are above. And so, one finds that every such movement, when lifted up by loftiness of mind, is conformed to the beauty of the divine image.” Redirecting these various emotions, however, is easier said than done. Sister Verna suggests that, first, one ought to address the problem of pride, which is often at the root of all other passions and mental tendencies. Instead of trying to passively avoid pride, however, one should actively try to practice the virtue of humility, the virtue from which all other virtues are derived. Sister Verna acknowledges that humility has often gotten a bad rap today, and been used “falsely as a weapon to keep women, the disabled and members of minority groups in their place and to silence their righteous protests by labeling them as proud.” She tries to reinvigorate the virtue of humility, by explaining that “real humility has nothing to do with creating in myself a low self image or making myself feel guilty. It means recognizing that all my talents and virtues are gifts from God for which I am profoundly thankful. […] Humility is not about pondering how awful I think I am, it is about how I relate to others.

                Fr. Mel’s suggestion, admittedly, will at first seem to be trite: as much as you can, live in the present. The mind, he argues, seeks to dwell either in the past (memory) or the future (fantasy), since “The present moment is completely outside the mind’s control and thus […] it rejects the here and now. […] It lives in an environment of constant complaint and discomfort.” Since the mind’s main task is to label and organize information, the present moment presents itself as a kind of unsortable anomaly to us: there is no form to the present moment, no recognizable beginning and end to it, nothing to measure.  It is a mystery. The mind spends most of its time in desires and fears—both of which are either in reference to the past or future rather than the present. And so, our mind distracts us in all sorts of ways from the present: we watch movies, read novels, spend endless amounts of time online, stay in bed longer than necessary… All the while secretly disdaining the present.

The heart, however, is what allows us to live in the present moment, because the heart is the part of us that was made to embrace ambiguity and mystery without having to resolve it. At first, everything that Fr. Mel wrote seemed to me overly simplistic, but as I said I have been going through his work for several months now, and it has steadily grown on me. In the instances where I have been stressed by some anxiety or other, and have been fortunately able to recognize it, the worry has always stemmed from something in the past or future I was trying to solve, rationalize, justify myself, or conquer—even just in the back of my mind.  One day, I was on a walk in a beautiful park in Wolfenbüttel, but the whole time hovering between research-induced stress and future-induced fantasy regarding other areas of my life. Finally, I sat on one of the swings and forced myself to describe the present moment. I tried to pick out as many things I was experiencing that had nothing to do with the past or future: the feeling of the sun on my skin, the color of green in the budding trees, the sound of ducks and passersby… It took me nearly twenty minutes to complete the list of everything I was experiencing—and none of them had to do with the stress of research or future life possibilities, none of which could be solved in the present anyway. I left the swing more able to simply face the present, to be calm in my own skin regardless of what the future brings, and to thank God for what is around me. As Fr. Mel audaciously claims, and I’m still deciding whether its worth agreeing with: “The only part of life that is ‘real’ in all its dimensions is the present. And the present moment has many qualities, but it is almost always full of joy.” So far, I am finding this statement to be more realistic than I once thought; I think the joy comes from knowing that, when we dwell in the present, we are dwelling in reality, and surviving reality, and thus we have nothing to be afraid of. Truth is what sets the human person free, and truth is not knowing the answer to every one of life’s riddles, it is the ability to accept life, or the present moment, as it is: a mystery, ambiguous, and full of potential.   

---

[1] Psychosomatic in a theological context means the characteristic of being composed of both mind (psyche) and body (from the Greek s­oma, somat- “body”).  In Judeo-Christian anthropology, humans were created in the divine image with both soul and body; both aspects are inextricably intertwined with one another and part of what it means to be fully human. 

[2] Possessing a physical body, not just being a spiritual being.

[3] After the fall of the western Roman Empire in the late fifth century, western theologians increasingly followed in the tradition of Augustine of Hippo, who first articulated the doctrine of original sin, which would have far-reaching effects on western views of human beings—both for Catholics and eventually Protestants and secularists alike—into the present day (see theologians like Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin and many others). In the eastern Roman Empire, which eventually transformed  into the Byzantine empire, the Augustinian view of human personhood was never taken very seriously. “Human nature” refers rather to the Good purposes and capacities for which humans were originally created, and “sin” is a divergence from this Good. In fact, the Greek word for sin (hamarthia ) literally means “to miss the mark.” Theologians in whose work this topic can be explored include Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Palamas.  

The First of May & Other Signs of the Apocalypse

(I wrote this entry a few weeks ago but had to edit it before posting. My apologies for the lack of pictures, etc. I think you'll all survive. Pending any encounters with the end of the world.)

Last week, quite a buzz could be heard in the mandatory coffee breaks around the library. The topic of the buzz was the first of May. It was decided that, in honor of the first day of May, a bunch of us were going to have a barbeque for dinner on Tuesday. At first, this struck me as relatively innocuous. After all, we normally gather one of the evenings during the week for some harmless dinner activity or other. But this activity seemed to be different than the other ones, somehow. There was a general excitement about it all, where to buy the Wurst, what we were going to eat, etc. 

On Monday night, the last night of April, the streets were aglow with general rowdiness that is very uncharacteristic for Wolfenbüttel, whose citizens seem to operate on an 8PM bedtime curfew (much to my liking). 

“Tomorrow is the first of May,” F., a German, commented matter-of-factly. “What do you expect?”

Well, for one thing, I expected the approaching month of May to be treated with all the decorum normally afforded the advent of any other new 30-day-cycle—namely, total apathy and lack of differentiation from the 30-day-cycle that preceded it. What is it with these people and the month of May? I kept wondering. It’s just a month, for Pete’s sake. I mean, grilling is one thing, but speeding down the street in loud mopeds at all hours of the night? (All hours of the night, for Cole and Wolfenbüttel culture, meaning 10:15 PM.) I chalked it up to one of those odd things about Germany I will never quite wrap my mind around, like how can they eat so much high-fat cheese and not be bloated with gas all the time? Or why do they find peanut butter so repulsive, and insist on selling one tiny jar of it for three euro in the supermarket?

~*~

I work with a very peculiar bunch of people in this archive. Some of them are doctors, others are teachers, still others are theologians and philosophers. So far, all of them I’ve gotten to know are men, which really doesn’t surprise me. Another thing: for as learned as they are, they have terrible spelling and their punctuation is atrocious. How did they get to the esteemed positions they occupy? Who knows.

What always strikes me is that they are a pretty variegated group of people, and it’s hard to determine how or why they’ve all ended up here. They’re all very different and sometimes have bitter disagreements over things. Now, Germans like to split hairs. The other day, they were arguing about what exactly the weather is going to be in the coming days. Before that, there was a vehement discussion on how much a person should rely on knowledge versus faith, and what knowledge even is—which would have been really interesting, had they not been throwing around obscure Latin chroniclers from the 3^rd century BC. 

But as different as they all are, I’m slowly learning that they all have three central things in common.

The first, is that no one has anything nice to say about the Turks or the Jews. I mean, no one. Well, that’s not true, I think I heard someone praise the Jewish mathematician Maimonides one time. Other than this, they are quite a racist group of people. The only other person they hate more is the pope—at least the popes in the present. The older the pope is, the less of a bad guy he is.

The second, is that they all firmly believe the end of the world is nigh. Whether it’s a comet in the sky, the appearance of Siamese twins in Silesia, a particularly wet winter, or hearsay regarding a cluster of grapes that suddenly grew a beard somewhere in Italy, the world in which we live is a very old one that is about to die of a heart attack—the sooner the better. Our world has seen so many monumental changes, shaking the political, economic, climactic, tectonic and religious foundations of our civilization that there is only one plausible explanation: Christ is soon to return and call His people home. My colleagues may disagree on the specific symptoms—when exactly this may happen or which astrological sign exactly that comet first appeared under—but the prescription is unanimous: repent, for the day is near. When you are done repenting, repent again.

The last thing they have in common, of course, is that they are all dead. By about 1720, they were all buried in the ground. Sometimes it makes me sad, that I’m the only living person apart of our conversations. Then, though, I just turn the page—there’s always more to read, more to think about, more to notate, more to chuckle about…

I mean, come on, a cluster of grapes that grew a beard?  You can’t make these things up.

~*~

My walk to the library Tuesday morning, the first of may, was a peaceful one, and it occurred to me, as it often does in the mornings, how beautiful and peaceful little WfB is. But it particularly occurred to me that morning, because it was particularly quiet and peaceful. In fact, I daresay it was apocalyptically quiet: no one was sitting outside the cafes flaunting their culturally-accepted caffeine addictions; no kids were peddling about, rushing to school. Even the ducks were elsewhere.

When I got to the library, I couldn’t help but notice how all of the doors were completely locked and barricaded (the building I work in used to be an armory in the mid 18^th century), and all of the windows had their nighttime shutters on. I suddenly realized that there may be a reason why everything had been so quiet that morning, and why the library was locked: no one had gotten out of bed this morning. I looked around me. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, everything was gay and happy, that is: gay, happy, and completely void of any human being besides myself. What could possibly cause a general populace to refrain from waking up in the morning?

Unless… I began thinking. No, that can’t be. I was about to think, “Unless I’ve been left behind. I mean, you know, Left Behind.”

Now, to be fair, I am an academic. I did critically analyze the situation from all possible angles before settling on the apocalypse idea. For example, one reason why everything was so eerily quiet was that my life (unbeknownst to me) the real story that the Truman Show movie was based on. For some reason, on this first of May 2012,  the director forgot to cue “places” to all my friends/ hired actors before I left my apartment. That didn’t seem realistic, though, because who would want to watch a TV show about a woman who sits in an archive reading dusty books written by dead people all day. Not me, and I am that woman. I have to watch that show everyday. To make matters worse, I have to blog about that show. Trust me, it doesn’t draw a crowd. So that possibility is out.

And so, reality began to sink in. The only fathomable reason why this many people would fail to show up at work, or cafes, or bakeries on such a beautiful day, is that they had all been raptured up to heaven, and the time of great tribulation was upon us who remained.

It is going to be a long summer, I thought, heading back to my apartment. A long, apocalyptic summer.

~*~

One of the biggest taboo topics to talk about with dead people from the past is the weather. I should know, because that’s what I’m trying to pull out of the sources right now. When you ask about it, they hush up, like you just said a four letter word (and “rain” in German doesn’t even have four letters. Neither does “snow,” so that’s no excuse.)

Like I said, I am dealing with the weather right now. That is, I’m trying to find out how people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thought about the weather, natural seasons, how they experienced it, where they thought it all came from, what types of weather they witnessed, etc. This is important, because my wider dissertation topic involves how people perceived the passage of time, or the year. A major way that people experience time—then as now, but more so then--is through the rhythm of seasons, sunlight, and stars (back then, stars were a really big deal because that’s where you looked to see if time was about to end, i.e. the apocalypse).

Now, the weather is my fall back topic of choice at awkward dinner parties and other mandatory social gatherings. “How about this weather we’re having, huh?” This is always a safe, appropriate, culturally-relevant question to ask in any situation. I once posed this question to a man I didn’t know in Cincinnati. It was raining out, and we were in the waiting room of the ER. I had a pretty bad cold, he had a potentially fatal head wound. It was fine, we had a lovely conversation.

For some reason, though, asking people of the past about the weather is somehow not as reliable. They didn’t have TV weather shows I can look at, they didn’t have the same kind of newspapers we have today. They didn’t have books with titles like This Book Will Tell You Exactly How People In the Early Modern Period Thought About the Weather, Specifically for the Purpose of Informing Nicole Lyon’s Dissertation Topic in the Year 2012 (I know, because I checked the card catalogue on that one. Negative.)

So how do I figure out what people back then thought about the weather? How do I get to the bottom of this mystery.

I circumlocute, or rather circum-inter-locute. I trick the people I work with—the dead, grape-beard-believing folks—into talking about the weather the same way you trick a kid into telling you who really broke the vase. That is, I don’t ask about the weather at all. I pretend I don’t even care about the weather. I read other materials, materials that don’t appear to have anything to do with weather patterns—like pamphlets about the war, or comets, or diseases. And then I ask the person writing it what kind of job they had—were they a farmer? A doctor? What year was this published in? Were there any big floods during that time? I ask how their crops are doing. I ask if there is inflation on the price of wheat in the city where they reside, and if so, why. War? A dry summer? A wet spring?  I pay attention when they talk about the moisture in the air (which is all the time, because they hated it), rain, or the skies, or the future, or past snow storms, or waking up to the sound of birds, or how cold they’ve been feeling.

And the more you listen, the more you don’t ask how the weather is doing, the more they get tricked.

Slowly, they start to tell you things.

~*~

By the time I made it back to my apartment, the reality of the rapture had become an evident truth. (I know what you think about the rapture, Fr. Steven, and yes I thought about that, too.) Everyone must have known the end of the world was coming, I thought. That’s why they planned the grill party, to celebrate.  That’s why everyone was so excited.

As I walked the quiet, cobblestone streets, I surmised that the rapture had happened sometime around midnight. There was not even the smell of bread dough in the air from the countless bakeries that line the streets, which I happen to know starts getting baked a little after midnight. On the side of the walkway to my apartment, a bike lay tipped over. Someone had probably been out riding late at night, I thought, and suddenly their body was raptured so the bike tipped over. Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking incessantly, which I’d never heard in WfB because the dogs are uncommonly well-behaved. But I would bark, too, if my owner had suddenly disappeared without leaving me any breakfast.  I unlocked the door to my building, still no sign of life anywhere.

~*~

Most of the time when I don’t ask about the weather, and the sources tell me things about the weather, it’s actually about the end of the world. To say that these people were apocalyptic would be an understatement. They know what it means to be left behind: their old documents have been left behind for centuries for people like me to pick endlessly through and tease endearingly on obscure blogger sites.  But, to their credit, the generations of folks whose writing I read were living in the wake of societal changes the likes of which were unprecedented. The invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation and breakdown of a unified Christian Church, political fragmentation between nobles and other elites, a changing calendar,  intense and prolonged religious warfare that devastated the a whole host of villages and cities, the Copernican revolution, widespread economic panics, new inventions like the telescope and microscope, a climactic change known as the little ice age, the scientific revolution and Newtonian physics, the early Enlightenment, and many other changes. As silly as bearded grape clusters sound, it’s no wonder that many people—for various reasons, especially Protestants—grasped for something bigger to make sense of their fluctuating, unstable surroundings. If you can’t have any security in any normalcy around you—if you can’t even have faith in the calendar you use staying the same—then at least you can have faith in the Apocalypse. Belief in the impending end of time was the umbrella under which all the confusing twists and turns of their seemingly crumbling civilization could be fit. Things were falling apart, but at least they were falling apart with a purpose, and at least someone—or should I say Someone—was in control of it all.

~*~

And as I faced the dawning of a new, apocalyptic era, my first activity was to checked my email (this is my normal strategy to withstand the usual existential crisis of the day). Betwixt the usual University of Cincinnati crime announcement about the latest person to be robbed on McMillan street at 2AM yesterday, there was a pleasant email or two from coworkers (living ones, not dead ones) wishing everyone at the library a happy first of May.

Once again, the usual question flooded my mind like so many showers of apocalyptic-foretelling rains. What is with these people and the first of May? The more obvious question that should have entered my mind but didn’t was: How can I be getting emails from people that were supposedly raptured? Because, by then a light bulb had gone off in my mind. That light bulb took the form of randomly recalling some helpful tips in an information packet a German academic organization had sent me in preparation for my research. It was a bit of advice I had swiftly shrugged off my shoulders like so many bearded grapes rolling down a steep hill.

“Before departing, print off a list from the internet of all federal holidays in German, as some are different from American federal holidays.” I guess that pretty much says it all right there. So, I had been spared being Left Behind… For now.But… that means… Oh no. Perspiration formed upon my brow. My heart started racing, because I knew. I knew what I was in for. I knew that the only thing worse than being Left Behind in Germany is trying to get through a Federal Holiday in Germany with no prior warning. 

Now, federal holidays in Germany are a different species of federal holidays in the US. My impression that the rest of the town had been raptured should give you some indication for the type of dynamic we are talking about. At least if it had been the apocalypse, looting the grocery store around the corner was a possibility for necessary vittles. Apocalypse= no laws, no currency exchange rate= survival is a highly likely possibility. Federal Holiday, on the other hand= EVERYTHING is closed including the meaning of life and any form of transportation out of this city= no chance of looting because police will be on duty the very next day= I’m going to starve to death. I am going to starve to death on the first of May.

Luckily, I found a bin of tomatoes in my fridge, yogurt and I think some bread. I would live another day, pending the eventual apocalypse which could come at any moment, even on a federal holiday. I decided, though, it would be a good idea to repent anyway. Which I did, the sardonic tone of this blog post notwithstanding. I repented for my sarcasm, too, don’t worry. Lord have mercy.