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.
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