By Scott Cairns
“He leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul.”
—Psalm 22:3
Among a good many advantages our predecessors in the early Church could claim was a more nearly adequate vocabulary. For instance, they were in possession of a number of words that indicated a number of amazing truths. Nous, kardiá, népsis and théosis were among those words that helped to keep the young Body focused on the task at hand, the task of healing our shared array of rifts — rifts within ourselves, between ourselves and others, and, most keenly, between a Holy God and a race of creatures that had broken off communion.
Three of those words — nous, népsis and théosis — have been all but lost to our contemporary conversation, and the deep significance of another, kardiá, which is to say “heart,” has been sorely diminished. With these onetime commonplace words enhancing their spiritual conversations, our predecessors were better able to give their attentions to the profound complexity and the vertiginous promise of the human person, another treasure neglected over the centuries.
The import of nous has been obscured thanks to a history of not-so-good choices translating that very good Greek word into other languages that didn’t have direct equivalents. What we have received are, at best, half measures, and none of them sufficiently delivers to us the mystery of ourselves.
In most cases, translations have replaced the mysterious noun with something that addresses maybe half of a complicated story, and leaves us, on occasion, misdirected in what we make of things.
For instance, when Saint Peter employs his accustomed, muscular language to encourage us — “Gird up the loins of your minds” — nous is the word that is shortchanged, having been replaced with mind. When we read in Saint Paul’s epistle to the Romans, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” the word mind is again what we are given in lieu of the more suggestive nous.
In the above passage from Saint Paul, a good deal of significance appears to be placed upon right thinking — specifically, the renewing of our minds — as if by thinking better thoughts, by fine-tuning our theologies or by undergoing a bit of brain-scrubbing we might find ourselves duly equipped to “prove what is [the] good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
Virtually every time we come across the word mind (or, in some cases, intellect or reason) in an English translation of the New Testament, nous is the word being rendered. One might say that it is the word being surrendered.
The greatest danger is that what should be an actively performed faith, a lived faith, becomes little more than an idea. When it is most healthy, ours is not a simply propositional faith, but a faith embodied and performed. Having lost this understanding, much of Western Christendom and much of an unduly influenced Eastern Church, has squandered the single most essential aspect of the Christian life: that we are ill, that what we need most is to be healed — our nous purified, illumined and restored to actual communion with the God who is.
Until we shed the scholastic view that all we need are better ideas, until we apprehend that our deep illness must be cured and our smudged nous recovered, we remain susceptible to smug, deluded, recurrent failure and, perhaps, actual separation from the Body of Christ.
Another New Testament word that could benefit from a rigorous appraisal is kardiá, offered to us simply as heart. Early Christians, taking their lead from Jewish and other Semitic traditions, understood this word as indicating more than the pump in our chests, or as a figure of speech for our emotions, feelings and affections. They understood kardiá as the very center of the complex human person, and as the scene of our potential repair.
As our long tradition has figured the matter, the human person is herself/himself something of a trinity. Various writers in that tradition are likely to name our tri-parts variously, but most agree that thanks to the dire severing of our persons from the Triune Persons of our Life-giving God, we have become splintered, or something of a crippled tripod, a triangle that doesn’t ring true.
We may be body, soul and spirit true enough, but, for most of us, our wholeness and unity remain either troubled or downright fractured.
We are compelled toward balance, but we are bent.
We hope to be even, but we are at odds with ourselves, at odds with our constituent bits, and as a result we have become somewhat less than the sum of our parts.
“Gather yourself together in your heart,” writes Saint Theophan the Recluse, “and there practice secret meditation. … The very seed of spiritual growth,” the saint insists, “lies in this inner turning to God. … Or, still more briefly, collect yourself and make secret prayer in your heart.” On another occasion, Saint Theophan writes, “The Savior commanded us to enter into our closet and there to pray to God the Father in secret. This closet, as interpreted by St. Dimitri of Rostov, means the heart. Consequently, to obey our Lord’s commandment, we must pray secretly to God with the mind in the heart.”
~Scott Cairns, “Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-cairns/repairing-the-person_b_782750.html. Scott Cairns is Professor of English at University of Missouri and Founding Director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece. Submitted by John Bonadeo.
