I The Anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa

II The Anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa, Part Two III

III The Cosmology of Evagrius Pontikos

III.1 The Evagrian Doctrine of God

III.2 The Evagrian Doctrine of the Movement

III.3 The Evagrian Christology

III.4 The Evagrian Cosmology

III.5 The Evagrian Doctrine of the Minds (Noes)

III.6 The Evagrian Anthropology

III.7 The Evagrian Angelology

III.8 The Evagrian Demonology

III.9 The Evagrian Eschatology

III.10 Evaluation of the Evagrian System

III.11 Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod

III.12 Return to St Gregory of Nyssa

III.12 The Relation Between Mind and Soul

IV Western Christian Anthropologies

V The Vocation of Man

Chapter I -- 1

I THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ST GREGORY OF NYSSA

The most philosophical of the Cappadocian Fathers,[1] St Gregory of Nyssa (c.331–c.394)
wrote On the Soul and the Resurrection (c.386) to record a conversation with St Macrina
(c.327–379), his elder sister, which occurred while St Macrina was on her deathbed. He
wrote On the Making of Man (c.379) to complete his brother St Basil the Great’s
commentary on the first part of the Book of Genesis, On the Six Days of Creation,
interrupted at the making of man by St Basil’s own death.

While the form of dialogue between St Gregory and St Macrina in On the Soul and the
Resurrection is usually considered to be a mere literary device for the presentation of St
Gregory’s own views, we see nothing to prevent St Macrina’s being fully able to have
participated, as the teacher of her brother younger than her by some years, in such a
deathbed dialogue, to which in any event St Gregory refers in his life of St Macrina as having
taken place. We will therefore report the views ascribed by St Gregory to St Macrina as her
own, and not those of her younger brother. That is not to deny that St Gregory, who wrote
On the Soul and the Resurrection some years after St Macrina’s death, did not form the
dialogue or recall it with the prism of his own views before his mind’s eye.

The dialogue opens with the visit of St Gregory, grieving over the recent death of St Basil, to
his sister, St Macrina, whom he finds also on her deathbed. He gives himself over to the grief
that death occasions, to which St Macrina ultimately replies:

Surely what alarms and disturbs you is not some sort of fear that the soul,
instead of lasting forever, ceases with the body’s dissolution?[2]

It is interesting that St Macrina answers her brother in this way: she takes the existence of a
soul in a living person for granted, as did her brother in his final, preceding expostulation,
but poses the question: Perhaps you fear that the soul does not survive death?

St Gregory has just remarked on the radical difference that all of us know who have lost
someone we love: he, or she, who was alive, has been lost, and we see nothing but ‘the
remains, already beginning to rot’. As St Gregory has already put it:
 When therefore in these things the change is seen, and that vivifying principle,
then, whatever it once was, all of a sudden becomes invisible and unseen, just as
in the case of an extinguished lamp where the flame hitherto hanging from it
neither remains upon the wick nor departs to some other place, but passes over
to complete disappearance, how could it occur that one could bear without
sorrow the change of such a great magnitude, being supported by nothing
manifest beforehand?

The important thing to understand is that the Ancients were struck by the remarkable
difference between the living and the dead.

That someone was alive they ascribed to the presence of a soul. That he was dead they
ascribed to the departure of that soul. The soul was what made the person alive.

Even Ancients, such as Epicurus, who denied life after death did not doubt the presence of a
soul in a living person.

Moreover, Aristotle’s (384–322 bc) famous definition of the soul—‘Therefore the soul is an
actuality of the first kind of a natural body having the potential of life. Such a body would be
organic.’[3]—is based on this distinction.

Moreover, the first sense of the passage in the Book of Genesis—‘And God made man, dust
from the earth, and blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto a living soul.’
(Gen. 2, 7)—is based on this distinction.

Hence, the problem for St Macrina’s reply is not whether a living person has a soul—this she,
as her brother does, takes for granted—but whether that soul survives death.

In the passage of St Gregory that we just quoted, St Gregory referred to ‘that vivifying
principle … whatever it once was’.
Here, St Gregory is posing the problem in this way: Granted that something, whatever it is,
makes the person alive, when the person dies it seems to disappear irrevocably.

This is that irreducible distinction between the living and the dead: a book or pen is dead; a
computer is dead; my brother or my mother is alive. The ancient mind could not get round
this distinction.

Nowadays, in modern biology, as a matter of scientific paradigm, this distinction is

abolished. It is called ‘vitalism’.

In the Fourth Edition of Molecular Biology of the Gene, a standard textbook of molecular
genetics, we read:

Nonetheless, through the first quarter of this [Twentieth] century, many scientists thought that some
vital force outside the laws of chemistry differentiate [sic] the animate from the inanimate. Part of the
reason for the persistence of this ‘vitalism’ was that the success of the biologically oriented chemists
(now usually called biochemists) was limited…[4]

Besides general ignorance of the structures of the large molecules in the cell, the feeling was often
expressed that there is something unique about the three-dimensional organization of the cell that gives
it its living feature. This argument was sometimes phrased in terms of the impossibility of ever
understanding all the exact chemical interactions of the cell. More frequently, however, it took the form
of the prediction that some new natural laws, as important as the cell theory or the theory of evolution,
would have to be discovered before the essence of life could be understood. But these almost mystical
ideas never led to meaningful experiments and, in their vague form, could never be tested.[5]

The author of the earlier editions of this textbook, and the main author of this, the Fourth
Edition, is none other than James D. Watson (1928–), Nobel laureate for the discovery of the
double-helix structure of DNA, the chemical of which genes are made.

Here, the argument is that there is no ultimate difference between the living and the dead; it
is all a matter of biochemistry; and the distinction between the living and the dead that was
irreducible to the Ancients is quite irrelevant, a matter of the state of biochemical systems.
Certainly—ignoring here questions of when a person dies, the so-called question of brain
death—these men, like anyone else, would recognize that someone they knew was alive or
dying or had died.

However, they would not see the matter as the presence or absence of the person’s inner
being, whatever that might be and whether or not it were considered to survive dying.

They would see the matter as biochemistry.

This point of view is very important.

It places biology squarely in the scientific and philosophical paradigms that have dominated
Western thought since Newton and the empiricists.

Newton (1642–1727) introduced mathematical models into physics and gave good
quantitative answers, basing himself on a mechanistic interpretation of and motivation for
those models.

Hume (1711–1776), for us the most important of the empiricists, rejected the existence of
non-sensible objects, and, wishing to emulate Newton’s methods in physics, developed a
theory of cognition that was based strictly on sense-perception.

Newton’s theories were modified, first by Einstein (1879–1955) in the special theory of
relativity (1905) and the general theory of relativity (1915), and then by quantum mechanics
(1926).

In the same period, Hume’s theories, having passed through English Utilitarianism,
developed into the logical positivism of the early Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the Vienna
Circle (1920’s and ’30’s), and the ordinary language philosophy of the late Wittgenstein.

The result today is an intellectual climate in the West quite consistent with the remarks
quoted above from Watson and his fellow authors.
Let us look more carefully at the rejection by this school of thought of the existence of a soul,
even mortal.

It is clear from the quotations above that this school’s intellectual program entails the
reduction of the phenomena of ‘life’ to biochemical reactions. This is even clearer in other
passages of Molecular Biology of the Gene. An example might be the history of the scientific
study of fermentation: the description passes from the discovery of the necessity of the
presence of yeast for the fermentation of grapes into wine to the discovery that ‘the living cell
per se is not necessary for fermentation and that a cell-free extract from yeast can, by itself,
transform glucose [the sugar component of grapes that is transformed into alcohol] into
ethanol [alcohol]’. The authors continue: ‘Not only was this step conceptually important, but
it also provided a much more practical system for studying the chemical steps of
fermentation.’[6]

In their conclusion to their historical introduction to their book, the authors of Molecular
Biology of the Gene state:

Now all major features of living cells—the generation of useful energy from food molecules and the sun,
the ways energy-rich molecules promote the making of desired chemical bonds, and … the functioning
of genes—can be understood in terms of well-defined chemical principles…

…[I]t is only because the basic facts of biochemistry are now so firm that we shall soon be able to move
on to attack the still unsolved major biological problem of how fertilized eggs develop into the
marvelously complex forms of higher plants and animals. Only by feeling that the essence of the living
single cell is now well within our grasp [as a matter of biochemistry], can we so optimistically proclaim
that the essence of multicellular existence may now be an achievable objective.[7]

This program includes a materialistic and mechanistic interpretation of biochemistry. The

philosophical paradigm involved is a materialistic and mechanistic one. Part of this
paradigm is the rejection even of Aristotelian philosophical concepts.

This is important because Aristotle’s own definition of the soul tends to, although it does not
attain to, a functionalist interpretation of biological phenomena that might be called
materialistic. For the most part, Aristotle did not accept the Platonic definition of the soul as
an intelligible substance that inhabits the body.

Hence, the rejection of ‘vitalism’ and a fortiori of the existence of the soul is based in modern
biology on a materialistic and mechanistic philosophical paradigm. ‘Soul’ as a concept would
interfere with the intellectual program, based ultimately on Newton’s mechanistic program
in physics: materialistic and mechanistic models base themselves exclusively on sensible
phenomena, and the soul is commonly understood to be a non-sensible sort of thing.

Sensible phenomena can be measured.

There is also underlying this the philosophical climate related to the materialistic and
mechanistic paradigm that rejects formal religion in whole or reinterprets it in part in a
manner more consistent with the presuppositions of the materialist-mechanist. Here,
‘vitalism’—and the ‘soul’ a fortiori—are seen as relics of the old way of thinking dominated
by one or another religious orthodoxy. This, of course, is the intellectual legacy to the West of
the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment which placed human reason first. This can become
quite emotionally charged. We need only mention Darwin’s theory of evolution and the
controversies that surround it to make that clear.

Now in fact the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm was not unknown to St Gregory and
he puts it forward as a possible explanation of the liveliness of the person alive; we shall see
this shortly.

However, although St Gregory’s presentation of the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm

could have been written today, more than 1600 years after his death, today, as we have
already commented, the intellectual climate in the West is quite hostile to the very concept of
soul, and this marks a significant change from St Gregory’s day.

Let us look more carefully at this hostility.

In his private affairs, and in his mind, the biologist certainly makes judgements whether the
fellow next to him, the experimental animal or the experimental fungus or microbe is alive or
dead. As things get smaller, the judgement may get more difficult; and the precise threshold
may be difficult to define in any case. But were Jim lying on the floor—well, dead!—the
biologist would not say, ‘Hum, Jim’s biochemical state seems to have altered.’ He would, if
he were a normal man, say, ‘Jim’s dead,’ and seek help. If he were trained, he might check
Jim’s breathing. If he were a medical doctor, he might attempt cardiac massage. These
examples are not meant to exclude other possible, and normal, responses. The biologist
would not, however, unless he were a religious man, light a candle for the repose of Jim’s
soul. If he were a religious man, he might say a prayer, again for the repose of Jim’s entity
called ‘soul’. He might say a mass if he were a priest besides being a biologist. He might
recite a sutra if he were a Buddhist in addition to being a biologist, and so on. But if he were
a materialist—even one who practised the form of a religion for private motives of gain or
other benefit or social solidarity or atmosphere in the family home or whatever, without
believing—he would simply shrug his shoulders and say: ‘Jim’s bought it.’ We do make
intuitive natural judgements—again ignoring for the present technical procedures in the
matter of brain death as being the threshold between being alive and being dead—whether a
person is alive or dead.

For the Ancients, these intuitive natural judgements were phrased as ‘His soul is present.’—
being alive—and ‘His soul has departed.’—being dead. The judgement whether the soul was
present or absent did not necessarily involve a belief that the soul—here taken above all as a
vivifying principle—survived death. Nor did it necessarily involve a judgement or belief that
the soul was a ‘ghost in the machine’. The question what the soul was, was open to debate, as
indeed was the related question whether the soul survived death and, if so, how and where.
The reader can now see the significance of what St Gregory is going to say below. However,
let us continue with this analysis.

Given the intellectual climate in Ancient Greece, it did not seem strange to the Greeks to
consider the possibility that the soul was susceptible of a materialistic and mechanistic
explanation. It did not seem to them self-contradictory to consider such a possibility. Today,
in the universities of the West, in intellectual circles, such a consideration would be snorted
upon as ridiculous and infra dig., a sign of a lack of intellectual culture and respectability.

In ancient times, ‘soul’ had the meaning ‘being alive’, and ‘being alive’ could be construed—if
one wished, consistently with one’s philosophy—in a materialistic and mechanistic way. And
it is on this basis that St Gregory and St Macrina discuss the soul. The difference today is that
the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm is very defensive on such issues. It has passed
through a period of great fertility—Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, the
revolution in biology occasioned by the discovery of DNA are among its achievements—but it
cannot handle the broader questions. It simply says that they are meaningless. To the extent
that the inquirer aspires to the transcendent, he is told that it does not exist. Moreover, since
the present-day materialistic and mechanistic paradigm arose in reaction—severe reaction—
against the religious orthodoxy of the Western High Middle Ages, the period of the flowering
and ascendancy of the Scholastic method in philosophy, it has retained a very hostile attitude
towards both religion and Scholastic philosophy, the latter seen in the first place as accepting
non-material entities as existent, in the second place as Aristotelian and in the third place as
depending on an over-refined deductive reasoning instead of on the measurement of sensible
phenomena. ‘Soul’ is today seen by the materialist-mechanist as part of that religious
orthodoxy and as part of that philosophical tradition. Hence, although in ancient times ‘soul’
could be discussed with openness, today, the religious orthodoxy, intervening, has made the
materialist-mechanist to feel that it is infra dig. even to consider such a thing: the soul, as we
said, is non-sensible.

That is not to say that today there are no non-sensible concepts in science—in physics, say.
But they do not threaten the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm, having arisen from
within it. They are licit.

This is our explanation of the intellectual hostility in the West today to the concept of ‘soul’.

Chapter I -- 2

To return to the more general discussion of the concept of ‘soul’, the first question that ‘soul’
seeks to answer is ‘What is being alive?’ If you give an account of ‘soul’, you are giving an
account of being alive.

It will be very important to bear this in mind.

Now, as we have seen, especially in the quotations we gave earlier from Watson and his
fellow biologists, in the materialistic and mechanistic biological paradigm, ‘being alive’ is a
matter of the state of the biochemical systems of an organism: whether they are functioning,
and, if so, which ones are to be considered critical and functioning and which ones non-
critical. ‘Functioning’ here clearly means ‘operating chemically in the way that such systems
operate in healthy living specimens of the same type as the organism in question’. An
organism, say a human embryo, which were frozen but which could be thawed with a good
possibility that its biochemical systems would again begin normal operation would, of
course, be considered alive.

Note that as yet the question of ‘person’—that other aspect of the concept of soul, the aspect
that we have steadfastly been ignoring in the present discussion—has not yet been
introduced. We are completely at the most basic level of being alive or not.

Now, since St Macrina will later answer the materialistic and mechanistic interpretation of
life, especially of human life, let us continue with the next stage of the dialogue.

St Gregory is speaking:

I, then (for not even yet had I recovered my thought from the passion), was
replying somewhat the more rashly, not thinking over very carefully what I was
saying. For I said that the divine words resembled orders, by means of which we
are obliged that it is necessary to be persuaded that the soul remains forever.
For we were not led by some reasoning to such a dogma, but our mind (nous)
within us seems to accept by fear that which is commanded, and not to assent
by some voluntary impulse to those things which are said. Whence also the
sorrows over the departed become heavier, since we do not know exactly
whether this vivifying principle still exists in itself, and where and how, or
whether it is nowhere and in no way at all. For the uncertainty concerning the
truly existent makes equal the opinions on each side; and, on the one hand, this
thing seems true to many; on the other hand, the opposite thing seems true to
many. For there are certainly some among the Greeks having no small
reputation for philosophy who thought about and declared these things.
These are very much the words of Western man today: ‘A religious orthodoxy has taught us,
without reason, that there is an eternal soul and commanded us to believe in it. But no one
knows anything for certain, and many people have many different ideas on the subject. It’s
all opinions! Rubbish!’

St Macrina replies:

Leave off, she said, this silly talk from without, in which the inventor of the lie, for the
sake of damage to the truth, plausibly concocts opinions which are deceived. You, then,
look at this, that to believe in this way concerning the soul is nothing else than to be
estranged from virtue and to look towards the present pleasure alone, and to be made
to be despaired of, then, that life which is seen in the Ages [of eternity], according to
which life only virtue has the advantage.

This is the state of the West today.

Let us look carefully at this.

St Macrina replies as an Orthodox Christian of her day. ‘Away with this nonsense!’ she says.
She qualifies it as ‘from without’. The underlying Greek word is consistently used by the
Fathers to refer to pagan learning. Not that they were unfamiliar with it. The Cappadocian
Fathers were well educated, and St Macrina is presented as teaching one of them, her
younger brother, Gregory. A literary device? No. St Macrina knew pagan literature at least as
well as her two brothers, St Gregory and St Basil the Great.

St Macrina says that these are opinions—she is referring notably to the teaching that the soul
does not survive death—which are deceived, plausibly concocted by the father of the lie, the
Devil, for the sake of damage to the truth. Of course, a materialist-mechanist today would
scoff at this naïveté. Be that as it may, let us turn to the more important part of St Macrina’s
reply.

St Macrina says to her Christian brother ‘Beware, this line of reasoning will estrange you
from virtue.’
This is the first time that virtue has entered the picture.

What is virtue? Normally, today, it is considered to be a body of rules, primarily sexual,

which prescribe the proper behaviour for a man and woman of marriageable age considering
marriage to each other. However, we shall see a far more profound meaning for this term.

St Macrina says ‘This line of reasoning both estranges you from virtue’—here taken in a far
deeper meaning than we have just described—‘and teaches you to look towards the present
pleasure alone.’

St Paul says the same thing: ‘If at Ephesus I fought after a human fashion with the beasts,
what is the profit to me? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we
die.’[1]

St Macrina continues: ‘This line of reasoning also makes to be despaired of that life which is
seen in eternity, according to which life only virtue has the advantage.’ This ‘according to
which life only virtue has the advantage’ has this meaning: in eternal life, the only thing that
will help you is the virtue that you have acquired in this life. It does not have the sense that
eternal life is a gimmick to get you to be good in this life—to behave according to a certain set
of moral rules that are unpleasant and tedious. As we said, virtue has a far deeper meaning.
The sense is that that deeper virtue is a quest for eternal life, an actualization of eternal life
while we are still in this flesh, a preparation for eternal life—all the while without negating
those Christian rules of a proper moral behaviour while we are still in this flesh.

The reader can now see why we think that this is the state of the West today: the dominant
materialistic and mechanistic paradigm denies the survival of the soul—‘that vivifying
principle’—after the death of the person. Having taken that step, the West has done what St
Macrina—and the Bible—have cautioned would happen: it has turned, in despair over eternal
life, to hedonism. Not that this is an argument for the survival of the soul, whatever it might
be, after death—that you will become a hedonist if you do not believe in that survival of the
soul—but it is a diagnosis, a sober caution of what will happen if you follow this line of
reasoning. In the West today, we need only look round us to see that this is so.
Let us remind ourselves at this point that all we know so far about the soul for the purposes
of this dialogue is that it is ‘being alive’.

St Gregory replies:

And how, I said, could the opinion concerning the abiding of the soul become
for us very solid and unchangeable? For I myself feel that the life of men will be
widowed of the most noble thing in life, virtue I mean, if the faith in us
concerning this thing not be made most certain. For how can it be that virtue
should have a place with those for whom the present life is considered to be the
delimitation of being and nothing more is hoped for after this life?

St Gregory is saying: ‘How can we establish firmly our faith in the survival of the soul, that
vivifying principle, after death? I agree that without this belief we shall lose the most noble
thing in life, virtue. For how could virtue have a place with those for whom the present life is
everything and for whom there is nothing more to be hoped for after this life?’

The sense is quite clear. The only thing we need emphasize is that virtue has a far deeper
meaning than we might expect.

St Gregory has brought the dialogue round to this point: to save virtue, how can we establish
the survival of that vivifying principle, the soul, after death?

Then the teacher said, therefore it is necessary to seek whence reason might
take for us the necessary beginning concerning these things; and, if it seems
good, let the defence of the contrary dogmas come from you. For I see that in
you the intellect has been moved slightly towards such a downward course.
Thus the word of truth will be investigated after the antithesis.

This is clear.
St Gregory now begins right where we are: in the materialistic and mechanistic biochemical
paradigm.

Since, then, she commanded this, having entreated her not to suppose that I
was speaking against our dogmas in very truth, but so that the dogma
concerning the soul be constructed with certainty, those things which fall
against this goal having been washed away from below, I said: In some degree
of truth, those who defend the contrary argument might say these things: The
body, being composite, completely dissolves into those things from which it is
constituted. When the natural union from birth of the elements in the body has
been loosed, the inclination of each element occurs in all likelihood towards
that which is familiar, the very nature of the elements by a certain necessary
force rendering the familiar to the congener. For to the hot again the heat in us
will be united and to the solid, the earthy, and for each of the other things, the
displacement occurs towards that which is related. Therefore, after this, where
is the soul? If one should say that it is in the elements, he will necessarily agree
that it is the same as those elements. For there would not occur a certain
commingling of that which is of a different nature with that which is alien; and
if these things should be, then that which has been commingled with the
opposite qualities will be manifested plainly and completely as being to an
extent complex. That which is complex, then, is not simple; but in all events it is
contemplated in composition. Every composite thing, then, is by necessity
dissolvable. The dissolution, then, is decay of the thing which is constituted.
And, then, surely, that which is decaying is not immortal; otherwise, the flesh
would surely also be said to be immortal, that flesh which is being loosed into
those things from which it was constituted. If, then, the soul is something of a
somewhat different sort, where would reason suppose it to be, it not being
found in the elements by virtue of its being of a different nature; and there
being nothing at all existing in the world in which the soul, living in it
appropriately to its own particular nature, could occur? What, then, is
nowhere, neither exists at all.

This very important argument is the materialistic argument against the survival of the soul
after death.[2] Although expressed in terms of Classical Aristotelian philosophy, and in a
very difficult manner, and with a few aspects which are prior to modern chemistry, it is a
very good rendition of the ‘life is biochemistry’ argument of the materialistic biologist such as
we have already encountered in the quotations from Molecular Biology of the Gene. Let us
therefore analyse this argument very carefully.

The first concept that St Gregory invokes is that of the composite versus the simple. The
composite is that which is a union of other things. The simple is that which is not, that which
cannot be decomposed.

St Gregory says that the body is composite. In St Gregory’s day, men believed that there were
four elements—earth, air, fire and water—and that all material things were composed of
these four elements. What he is saying, however, is still true today. Today there are over 100
elements, some of them synthetic. It is these elements, themselves composed of smaller,
subatomic particles, and sometimes capable of transmutation from one element to another,
which we now know to combine to form the molecules which constitute the body, those
molecules which decompose again into smaller molecules or into their constituent elements
when the person dies. This is the discipline of chemistry, or biochemistry in the case of the
living cell and body; we cannot hope to present a course in chemistry, nor do we intend to.
However, no chemist today would deny that the body is composite, being composed of a
number of the naturally occurring elements combined in varying ways to form organic
molecules.

St Gregory expresses these facts, which we accept in their modern form, in terms of the
chemistry of his day, due largely to Aristotle’s systematization of the science of his time. This
ancient chemistry was formulated on the principle of the composition and dissolution of the
four elements we mentioned above. Although the science of the Ancients comprised only
four elements, it also included the essential notion that the chemistry of the body was a
matter of varying proportions of these four elements. The only essential difference in the
present argument is that the primitive science of St Gregory’s day considered that during the
process of the dissolution of the body, the elements by nature tended to return to their like:
the fiery to the fiery; the earthy to the earthy; the watery to the watery; the airy to the airy.
Nowadays, we know that the chemical transformations involved in the decay of a once-living
body are much more complex. However, St Gregory’s reasoning, not making use of the idea
that like gravitates to like when a body decomposes, is unaffected by that difference. Neither
is it affected by there being, today, over 100 elements, instead of the four that the science of
his day posited. St Gregory is not doing chemistry but philosophy. His analysis is valid no
matter how many elements there might be, for it depends on the material composite nature
of the body, not on the number of elements that constitute that material composite nature.

St Gregory’s argument—which is against the survival after death of the soul—goes like this:
When a person dies, the elements that constitute his body gravitate to their like. We would
say today that there is a process of chemical change called decay or decomposition—under
the influence of microbes certainly, but also naturally—such that the body for the most part
disintegrates. Therefore, after this, St Gregory says, where is the soul? If one should say that
it is in the elements he will necessarily agree that it is the same as those elements.

This is the first case. The soul, whatever it might be, is in the elements of the body. Here, the
reader should understand that ‘soul’ has the meaning ‘vivifying principle’. As we have seen,
scientists today who share the opinions of Watson and his fellow authors would dismiss this
‘vivifying principle’ and invoke biochemistry alone. However, that is what St Gregory himself
is saying: If we say that the ‘vivifying principle’ is the biochemistry of the body taken in a
strictly materialistic sense, then we must admit that that ‘vivifying principle’ is the same as
that body’s biochemistry. And, therefore, when the body decomposes, and the molecules
constituting the biochemical systems of the body are degraded (decomposed), dispersed or
altered, where is ‘that vivifying principle’, the soul? This argument against the survival of the
soul, where the soul is taken to be in the material elements of the body, hinges on the
disintegration of the body after death.

Let us look more specifically at how the soul, ‘that vivifying principle’, might be in the
material elements of the body.

This can have several senses. The first is that the soul is a part of the body. An example
might be that the soul of a man is his brain or, more generally, his nervous system. Then the
argument against the survival of the soul goes like this: When the man dies, his brain and
nervous system disintegrate. Where, then, is his soul, since ‘soul’ is just another name for
‘brain’ or, more generally, ‘nervous system’?
A more sophisticated sense of how the soul might be in the biochemistry of the body is that
the soul is the functioning of the body. This, of course, verges on Aristotle. Here again—and
this is why St Macrina will come to reject Aristotle’s definition of the soul—the death of the
body, and its disintegration, would be tantamount to the destruction of the soul.

If we replace ‘body’ by ‘brain’ or ‘nervous system’, then the third sense is that the soul of a
person is the functioning of his brain or nervous system. This is in fact the dominant
paradigm in medicine today, especially as concerns the concept of brain death. Note, here, in
regard to the concept of brain death, that a measurement of the electrical activity of the brain
or of some part of it or, more generally, of the nervous system is not taken as a substitute for
a measurement of the presence or absence of a soul, whatever that might be, such as a
traditional Christian might intuitively understand the term, but as an actual evaluation of
whether the person is alive or dead. That is, in the view of the dominant medical paradigm,
the functioning of the nervous system or of the brain or of the higher brain centres is the
person, and when that functioning stops—at whatever level the medical criteria state—then
so does the person. The basis of this paradigm—which cannot considered to be scientific fact
but the professional judgement of men—is precisely what we are discussing: the soul,
whatever it might be, is considered to be a part of the body, or else the functioning of a part
of the body, and the medical criteria seek to isolate the stage(s) at which one can reasonably
and ethically say that since that part of the body is no longer functioning, then one may
proceed as if the person had already died, even if some other part of the body, or even some
other (lower) part of the brain, should, perhaps with technical assistance, still be functioning.

Some remarks are in order here: First, since, as we have already remarked, ‘soul’ is a concept
quite out of intellectual fashion, these discussions of brain death are often phrased in terms
of ‘living’, ‘being alive’, ‘person’ or ‘personhood’. Those concepts are what are tied, in most
discussions of brain death, to the functioning of a part of the brain. However, these
discussions still depend precisely on the identification of the ‘soul’ or ‘life’ or ‘personhood’ of
the person with the functioning of a part of his body, in most cases the higher brain centres.

Second, the judgement that ‘being alive’ or ‘being a person’ is a matter of the functioning of
the higher brain centres is not scientific fact but based on a professional medical judgement.
Certainly, the higher brain centres are involved in ratiocination. However, the concepts of
‘death’ and ‘loss of personhood’ are not scientific facts, the way, say, that the chemical
reactions involved in the fermentation of glucose into ethanol in a wine-barrel are scientific
facts. The discussion of brain death is of a different order from science although it makes use
of scientific facts about the functioning of the brain and nervous system. It is an ethical
discussion, not a scientific discussion.

Third, there is a reason behind the introduction of brain death—taken as the cessation of
functioning of the higher brain centres although the lower brain centres might, perhaps with
technical assistance, still be functioning—as the criterion for the death of the person or of his
irrevocable loss of personhood. The reason is that if the person be allowed to complete the
natural cycle of dying so that all his brain centres stop functioning, his heart stops beating
and his circulation stops, then his organs will be useless for transplant, since they will have
begun to rot. This is an ethical discussion with a utilitarian cast: what is involved is a
utilitarian judgement that adoption of the criteria provides the greatest good for the greatest
number (those receiving the dying person’s organs so that they might continue to live or live
better) whereas the person dying is not really harmed, since the damage to his higher brain
centres—that part of him identified with his ‘soul’ or ‘life’ or ‘personhood’—is deemed to be
irrevocable.

It should be understood that this procedure for the evaluation of life and death through
measurements of electrical activity in the brain and, especially, in the higher brain centres,
depends conceptually on the materialistic argument that the soul of a person, whatever it
might be, the principle of his being alive, the principle of his personhood, is the functioning
of a part of that person’s body, here the higher brain centres. This view—which, as we have
remarked, is an ethical and not a scientific view, although it does use scientific language—
does not depend on traditional human criteria of the presence or absence of the inner person
who might inhabit, as it were, that body. The criteria used in brain death are strictly
materialistic. They correspond exactly to the argument that St Gregory is putting forward
against the survival of the soul after death.

To go on, the most sophisticated sense—apparently, in any case—in which the soul might be
in the elements of a person’s body is that the soul of the person is that person’s DNA or, in an
even more apparently sophisticated sense, the sequence of the DNA nucleotides that the
person had at natural conception—as we might say, the information content of the person’s
DNA at natural conception.[3]
We saw this point of view expressed by a theologian in a Greek theological journal. The
author stated that the view expressed by St Gregory of Nyssa in On the Making of Man,[4]
namely that the soul was in no particular part of the body, was verified by modern science,
because DNA is shown to be everywhere in the body. (There are in fact a few exceptions: red
blood cells, for example, have no DNA.)

What the theologian did not grasp is that St Gregory recognizes that a soul which is in the
elements—the biochemistry—of the body, here the DNA, is at death going to disintegrate
along with the body. His meaning in On the Making of Man is not that the soul is everywhere
in the elements (or cells) of the body, but that it is not in the elements at all.

Let us look carefully at this idea that the soul of a person is the DNA content of the fertilized
egg at natural conception, or even the information content of that DNA, for the idea—as the
existence of the article mentioned above indicates—has a certain attractiveness.

Let us recall for a moment Aristotle’s definition of the soul: ‘Therefore the soul is an actuality
of the first kind of a natural body having the potential of life. Such a body would be organic.’
‘Actuality’ (or ‘actualization’ or ‘entelechy’: entelecheia) is synonymous with ‘form’, that
which gives matter its actuality. ‘Actuality of the first kind’ refers to the distinction between
the actuality (say, knowledge) which I possess even though I may not be exercising it at the
moment—I may be asleep without for all that having been deprived of my knowledge of
mathematics, which is inactive because of the sleep—from the actuality (‘of the second kind’)
that is in full exercise—I am exercising my knowledge of mathematics by actually at this
moment computing the area of a circle.

‘Organic (organiko)’ in Aristotle’s definition is an ambiguous term. The context of Aristotle’s

definition, where he immediately proceeds in the following lines to discuss the organs of
plants seems to give the term a biological sense: an organic body is a biological body, one
organized into organs, which, Aristotle seems to be saying, even plants have.

The attractiveness of seeing the soul to be in the DNA seems to have to do with the idea that
the DNA is the ‘essential form’ of the person, that somehow that form or actuality that
Aristotle might be referring to in his definition of the soul really is the DNA, that the DNA is
the ‘heart’ of the person.

This point of view—that the soul of a man is his DNA at natural conception—has the
advantage, in addition to being, seemingly, au courant, of attaching the sense of ‘soul’ as
‘principle of unique identity’ to what in the standard model today of the genetic program
constitutes the principle of the uniqueness of the modelled organism.

We have argued, in The Genetic Program, A Systems Approach,[5] that the standard model
today of the genetic program—the Neo-Mendelian model—is faulty from the logical point of
view in not being developmentally oriented.

Moreover, we have suggested in the same work that there are random, or stochastic,
elements in the development of man, even, evidently, in the development of his nervous
system and brain. We can anticipate that identical twins, which account for 1 in 400 human
births[6] and which, since by definition they have developed from the same fertilized egg,
have exactly the same DNA at natural conception, will be slightly different, the one from the
other, even in their nervous systems, when they are adult individuals. That is not to deny
that identical twins look and act much alike. However, the argument that the DNA is the soul
founders. For 1 in 400 human births would then give rise to two persons with the same soul,
whatever that might be, and those two persons with the same soul would not be as adults
carbon copies the one of the other as regarded their bodies, by virtue of the stochastic
elements in development that we have just referred to.

No father of identical twins—we suppose—has ever imagined that his two sons or daughters
were the same person or had an identity or continuity of consciousness. When one of the
twins dies, in a car accident, say, the other suffers nothing: he or she does not also die, if we
assume that he or she was elsewhere at the time. Of course, the two twins would be equally
subject to genetically-based illnesses if they carried the genes which disposed to those
illnesses,[7] but that is another matter.
Moreover, in the normal process of development, the DNA in the cells is altered to a greater
or lesser extent. Not all the alterations are to the nucleotide sequence,[8] but some are: the
immune system, and evidently the brain, are examples of this.

As we have already remarked, not all cells contain DNA; red blood cells are an example of
this.

DNA is damaged by many routinely occurring events, including illnesses (especially some
viral illnesses), radiation and other ‘wear and tear’ events within the cell, and it is routinely
fixed by the cell—but with a certain error rate.

Hence, while the person’s soul might be considered to be the DNA or its information content
in the fertilized egg at natural conception, that fertilized egg is soon dividing and replicating
its DNA in the complex procedure called development, and not all the cells in the mature
individual will have exactly the same DNA that the fertilized egg had at natural conception.

Moreover, since cancer is apparently a disease of the control centres and transcription units
of the DNA, then it would have to be considered to be a disease of the soul, an odd
conclusion indeed.

The same might be said of any other disease which altered the DNA, especially a disease
which were caused by a retrovirus, a virus which inserts new DNA into a chromosome. These
diseases would all have to be construed to alter the soul.

Moreover, it is not at all clear how identifying the soul with the DNA would address the
question of that aspect of the soul that we have been concentrating on: its role as a vivifying
principle. The DNA contains information which is used to control the transition of the living
cell from one state to another, new state. That DNA is part of a cell-wide system, an
important part, surely, but it cannot be isolated from its cellular environment. It acts much
like the hard disk memory in a personal computer. In no known case does the DNA assemble
a cell around itself de novo, nor do we imagine that anyone would expect to find a DNA
molecule that did so. Viruses are a special case: they parasitize living cells, and their range of
possible hosts is precisely those cells with which their DNA (or RNA) is directly or indirectly
compatible. An alteration to the DNA of a cell is much like an alteration to a part of a
computer’s hard disk memory, and the procedure of transplanting a nucleus into an egg cell
is much like changing the hard disk of a computer. What is changed is the information—part
of it at any rate—that will control the transitions of the cell and its descendent cells from one
state to another.

Although the cell’s DNA provides the information that for the most part controls the
transition the cell will make from one state to another, its role is passive. It is in no sense
acting as a master controller or ‘big boss’ directing the parts of the cell or tissue or organ or
body what to do. The DNA does not make conscious decisions. It is merely a chemical.

However, the attractiveness of identifying the soul with the DNA depends on the notion that
the person alive, the healthy adult individual, is the result of all those transitions for the most
part controlled by the information in the DNA. Hence, if I change the DNA of the fertilized
egg at natural conception, I am changing the person’s soul. This is probably how the
theologian mentioned identified the soul with the DNA. But the DNA is simply a chemical.

The fundamental problem in the matter is the localization of the soul in the DNA or in its
information content. And the problem is precisely the one St Gregory has raised: all attempts
to localize the soul, whatever it might be, in the body, or in some part of it, or in the
functioning of the body or of some part of it, founder on the dissolution of the body at death.
This is even apart from the problem of locating those aspects that we would like to retain as
referring to the soul, for example consciousness, in 46 long double-helix molecules found in
almost every cell of the body.

When a person dies, his DNA—most of it, at any rate—dissolves. If the soul were the DNA, or
its information content, or somehow in the DNA, we would have a situation in which the
person’s soul would be located in multiple, perhaps partially degenerate, copies in the
person’s bones, which copies might not be exactly the same for the reasons given above—
unless the person perished by fire at very high temperature or even were cremated, in which
cases his soul would completely perish. While the Orthodox Church does not accept
cremation of the dead, it is certainly not because the cremated person’s soul is also cremated
—destroyed—along with his bones and flesh.
However, it is well to think about the connection ‘identity – soul – genetic program’ for a
moment. The mystique of cloning depends on this connection. This mystique is taken both
positively and negatively, but in both ways it is deceiving. Clones are an artefact of the
standard model today of the genetic program.

A clone, in reality, is nothing more than an artificially produced identical twin, identical to a
person already alive and, normally, already born. Identical twins have been around, as far as
we know, as long as man and have not created any excitement; as we have pointed out above,
they are just two people who look and act much alike. They might not even like each other, as
we were once advised by an identical twin concerning relations between her and her sister.

Moreover, as we have pointed out, the myth of the clone as a carbon copy of a living person
founders on the facts of development. Identical twins and clones are not absolutely identical,
certainly not in their immune systems and probably not in their brains. The current model of
the genetic program, not being developmental in nature, makes the error of equating identity
of nucleotide sequence in the perhaps artificially ‘fertilized’ egg[9] with identity of adult
individual, ignoring the chance and environmental aspects of the development of an
individual into a mature adult from a single cell. It is this aspect which led us above to say
that clones are an artefact of the current model of the genetic program: it is the non-
developmental nature of the current model of the genetic program that leads to the concept
of clone as carbon copy of a person already living; when the development of the human is
studied, it becomes evident that that concept is naïvely oversimplified and false.

We remarked above that there appear to be random or stochastic elements in the

development of the human nervous system, and even, evidently, of the human brain, and we
remarked just above concerning identical twins and clones that they probably do not have
identical brains. While these things are in fact true, we said them for convenience. We have
already discussed the limitations of localizing the soul, whatever it might be, in the brain, or
in some part of the brain, but it is easier to communicate the flaw in the logic of cloning by
making reference to that important part of a person’s body.

As we have pointed out, the localization of the soul in the DNA, or in its information content,
attracts us because—seemingly—the DNA in each cell contains the ‘code’—the information—
which defines the personhood of the person whose DNA is being considered. Hence the idea
that a clone of a person is the same person as the person who is being cloned is seen,
positively, as the perpetuation of the one person, or, negatively, as an attack on personhood.
We have listed some of the problems—there are others, for another forum—above. But, in
general, identical twins never posed this threat to personhood or even this hope of self-
perpetuation, this hope of artificial immortality, and, as we said, identical twins have been
around, as far as we know, as long as man.

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[1] 1 Cor. 15, 32.

[2] St Gregory will introduce mechanistic arguments against the existence of the soul further on.

[3] We say ‘natural conception’ to avoid here issues arising from genetic procedures such as cloning or genetic
engineering.

[4] Making G.

[5] Genetic.

[6] Gilbert p. 186.

[7] Not even that is such a straightforward business as it might seem.

[8] Some are alterations to non-nucleotide-sequence aspects of the DNA; we particularly have in mind methylation.

[9] The cloning procedure currently implants the nucleus of a somatic cell of the donor into a denucleated unfertilized
egg.
 Chapter I -- 3

In the above discussion, we have dealt with St Gregory’s first case, that the soul might be in
the elements of the body. St Gregory now has a second case. This is to be gleaned from
continuing to quote from his argument, at the point where we stopped to discuss the first
case:

For there would not occur a certain commingling of that which is of a different
nature with that which is alien, and if these things should be, that which has
been commingled with the opposite qualities will be manifested plainly and
completely as being to an extent complex.

The first part of this sentence has this meaning: For the first case, the one wherein the soul is
in the elements of the body, St Gregory has asserted that the soul would necessarily then be
the same thing as, or be one with, those elements. As his reason, he asserts that something
different in nature would not mix with the elements of the body, since the elements would be
alien to it. Such a something would be some sort of non-material substance.

In the second part of the sentence, he introduces his second case: If, however, such a thing
should come to pass, that some sort of non-material substance should be joined to the
elements of the body, and that non-material substance should be the soul, then that soul
must necessarily be complex (or, ‘various’). Evidently, St Gregory’s logic is this: if we suppose
that a non-material substance, call it the soul, should be joined to the elements of the body,
wherein we observe in the various parts[1] of the body contrary qualities, then that non-
material substance would itself have to have a certain complexity. This is evidently because it
would have to be united to parts of the body which have contrary qualities. The doctrine of
contrary qualities, certainly Platonic and Aristotelian, is connected to the physics and
chemistry current in St Gregory’s day: we have pairs of contraries such as hot and cold, dry
and moist, each of which characterizes the parts of the body on the basis of which element of
the four, earth, air, fire and water, predominates. We would say today that the chemical
elements, and, perforce, the molecules in the body which contain them, have various
chemical properties. To be able to latch on to all the parts of the body—all the chemical
compounds—with their various chemical properties, St Gregory is saying, the non-material
substance, call it the soul, would certainly have to be somewhat complex. It could not be
simple. This is the key to his argument. His logic, difficult to grasp, has this sense: The
chemical compounds in the body have different chemical properties, some of them opposite
in quality: some are acids, some bases; some are hydrophilic, some hydrophobic; and so on.
Any substance—whether non-material or material, although it does seem that St Gregory has
in mind a non-material substance; what he says is something of a different nature and alien
from the body—any substance, then, which were to connect into the body would necessarily
connect into acids and bases, hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds, and so on. To be
able to make all the necessary connections at all points of the body, that substance of a
different nature from and alien to the compounds of the body would itself have to be
somewhat complex, because the compounds of the body have different and opposing
chemical, and, more generally, physical characteristics, and that non-material substance
would have to connect into them all. A simple substance different from the nature of the
compounds of the body, because it would be simple—the same all over, not decomposable
into smaller units or faces—would not be able to make contact with all the chemical
compounds because of their complex and varying or even opposed chemical characteristics.

The question arises, although St Gregory does not discuss it, given that electromagnetic
waves were discovered 1500 years after his death: well, could the soul be some sort of
electromagnetic field?

An electromagnetic field has a certain complexity; its mathematical description foresees that
certain scalars or vectors or tensors will have different values at different points in space and
time. Neither is an electromagnetic field simple. Hence, even if one were to think in these
terms—and we do not for the reason that a field of electromagnetism or of any other force
known to science is a physical phenomenon—then the localization of the soul, whatever it
might be, in such a field would founder on what St Gregory is going to say next.

For St Gregory goes on that the complex is not simple, but always seen in the composite. But
what is composite is necessarily susceptible of dissolution. This is clear to us even today:
molecules once made can be taken apart; electromagnetic and other force fields change,
diminish and disappear. And that dissolution is the decay of what was constituted, the
molecule or force field in our examples: a large molecule, say haemoglobin, when it dissolves
loses its identity as haemoglobin; a force field once diminished is gone as a force field in the
region. But what decays is not immortal. Recall that St Gregory is concentrating on
arguments against the survival of the soul after death. What he is saying is that once we
accept his argument that the non-material substance, call it the soul, in order to latch on to
all the parts of the body must be complex, then we must concede that it must be susceptible
to dissolution and decay, and, if so, we must concede that the soul cannot be immortal
because it can decay into its constituent parts. Otherwise, the flesh itself would have to be
considered immortal, which is manifestly absurd.

Let us repeat the steps of St Gregory’s argument, which are difficult. He has said in his first
case that the soul must be in the elements of the body—we would say, a part of the body or
the functioning of a part of the body or the DNA or even the information content of the DNA
—since if it were of a different nature from the elements of the body then it could not mix
with the elements of the body. Then, as his second case, he says: well even if I concede that
the soul is of a different nature from the body but still mixed with it, then the soul must be
complex. His reason is that if the soul were of a different nature from the body, then it would
have to be somewhat complex in order to attach itself to all the various material parts of the
body at the biochemical level. But if the soul is complex, it is composite; if it is composite, it
can be decomposed; if it should be decomposed it will have lost its identity as a whole; if it
should lose its identity as a whole, it will no longer exist as a whole; and if it is capable of no
longer existing as a whole, it is not immortal of necessity.

How good is this argument? We find difficulty in accepting St Gregory’s step that the soul
must be somewhat complex in order to latch on to the various parts of the body at the
biochemical level. We are not persuaded. Once one accepts this step, however, the rest of the
argument follows. The assertion that something capable of decaying and losing its identity as
a whole is necessarily not immortal requires comment, however. This is an Aristotelian
position, the so-called ‘Principle of Plenitude’: ‘No genuine possibility can remain forever
unrealized.’[2]

This argument against the survival of the soul after death, quite abstract, does not have any
adherents today as far as we know, although it quite possibly could be advanced by a
materialist-mechanist against the possibility of a non-material ‘ghost’ in the body, the
machine, that survived the death of the body. It is an important but theoretical argument
against the existence of a soul which is different in nature from the body but which survives
the death of the body.
It appears, however, that the basis of St Gregory’s introduction of this argument is the
analysis of the nature of the soul by Epicurus.

It seems that Epicurus treated the soul as a sort of ‘subtle body’ inhabiting the body that we
know, but composed of a different sort of substance—call it a ‘subtle’ substance—than the
body. In Epicurus’ view, which we will discuss later in detail, this subtle body dissipated after
death. St Gregory’s argument then becomes clear as a presentation, in anonymous form, of
Epicurus’ reasoning why the soul cannot survive death.

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[1] We would say, today, in the various chemical compounds.

[2] For a discussion of this principle in the context of the philosophy of the High Middle Ages, see S. Knuuttila’s Chapter
17, ‘Modal Logic’, Section: ‘The principle of plenitude’, in the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
(Medieval pp. 344 ff.). See also, from a Platonic point of view, the Phaedo (Plato Volume I, 78c1–8).

Chapter I -- 4

St Gregory’s third case is rather easier to understand. St Gregory says: if the soul is not in the
elements of the body (the first case) and not connected to them (the second case), well,
where is it? For there is nowhere else in the world where it could live appropriately to its own
nature (evidently, as the soul of someone). And that which is nowhere at all does not exist at
all either. The only ambiguity is this: does St Gregory mean that the soul is nowhere in the
sense that with the assumptions given there is no soul at all in the living person or that,
under those same assumptions, the soul is nowhere after death—that it cannot survive death,
having nowhere to go? An attentive reading of St Macrina’s replies further on indicates that
the second reading is meant: the soul, if it is not in the elements of the body and is not
connected to them, cannot survive the death of the body.
Generally, St Gregory poses counter-arguments based on treating the soul as a material sort
of thing.

These three cases constitute St Gregory’s rendition of the materialistic argument against the
existence of a soul which survives the death of the person, although it certainly could accept
the existence of a soul which did not survive the death of the person.

There is another argument, that which is advanced by Watson and his fellow authors in
Molecular Biology of the Gene, an argument which St Gregory does not make. This
argument goes something like this: Let us take a phenomenon such as fermentation: by
fermentation, grape juice pressed from grapes becomes wine. To the naïve person, this
process seems to require a ‘living thing’—yeast. However, modern science has uncovered the
chemical reactions which given the right environmental conditions convert the sugars of the
grape juice into alcohol. These chemical reactions can be duplicated in the test tube, and
alcohol produced, without yeast.[1] Hence, what the naïve person thought was an aspect of
‘life’—fermentation—is just a series of chemical reactions. So it is, paradigmatically, with all
the phenomena naïvely thought to be due to some phenomenon called ‘life’: they are in
principle—we say ‘in principle’ because not all the chemical reactions have been elucidated
yet; it is merely a matter of time—also merely chemical reactions which can be uncovered
and duplicated in the test tube. Witness cloning, freezing and thawing without ill effect of
fertilized human eggs, genetic manipulation of human chromosomes and so on. Hence ‘life’
is a meaningless concept. And ‘soul’, taken as ‘being alive’, its absence as ‘being dead’, is just
as meaningless. These are artefacts of a prescientific, prelogical way of thinking.

Given the manifest success of modern biochemistry and molecular biology in elucidating the
chemistry of the cell, including the human cell, and the advances in medicine that this
success has brought about, this argument has a great persuasive force today.

All of these arguments—the three that St Gregory has put forward, and the one we think
underlies the writing of the introduction to the Fourth Edition of Molecular Biology of the
Gene—hinge on the materialistic philosophical understanding of what can and cannot exist.
This materialistic position can be put thus: Only material things exist, and material things
are those which can be perceived by the senses, perhaps with the assistance of scientific tools
—microscopes, telescopes, radarscopes and so on.[2] All other things do not exist. They are
imaginary, figments of the imagination, fantasies. The world is a world of nuts and bolts,
trees and stars, flowers and atoms. These things exist. Nothing else exists.[3] It is a world in
which the chief science is physics, in which the paradigm for all the sciences is modern or
even classical physics.

On the basis of this philosophical position, the materialist rejects the existence of the soul,
and for the reasons that St Gregory or Watson and his fellow authors largely give. Either it is
a part of the body, or the functioning of part of the body, in which case ‘soul’ is an
unnecessary concept; or, if it is not, it is a non-sensible absurdity.

The importance of this materialistic philosophical rejection of the soul cannot be

overestimated.

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[1] By means of the cell-free extracts referred to earlier.

[2] Electromagnetic waves and fields are deemed to exist as material things of a special sort.

[3] Of course, this is not to suggest that materialists do not accept four fundamental forces and so on.

Chapter I -- 5

Let us look at the concept of ‘person’ that obtains in the West today on the basis of this
philosophical rejection of the concept of ‘soul’. The main aspect of this concept of the ‘person’
that strikes one is its relativization. A person no longer begins at conception; he no longer
ceases to be a person only at death. Since the dominant model posits that the person is the
normal functioning of his brain, and certainly of his higher brain centres, then, before the
development of the nervous system while the fœtus is developing in the womb, the embryo
or fœtus is deemed merely to be a piece of tissue. When the person is dying, moreover, the
loss of activity, measured electrically, of the higher brain centres is deemed to constitute a
loss of personhood.

Moreover, since the dominant conception of man that obtains today in the West is based on
the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, man is just another species of animal, one among many. This
has two implications: First, the peculiarities of man—say his speech, his ability to use tools,
his ‘spiritual aspects’—are considered to be merely the result of the fortuitous evolution of
the primate brain: man is an animal with a highly evolved brain; perhaps chimpanzees are
not so far from man as once thought; perhaps whales, with their very large brains, are even
more ‘spiritual’ than man. Second, questions are raised among philosophers who otherwise
seem to want to be taken seriously as doing philosophy in the Western tradition as to
whether the life of a man who is yet to write a play is to be given any more value than the life
of a dog that is yet to ‘go for one more run by the river’.[1] Even if we ignore the issue of a
conception of man that sees his highest aspiration as that of writing a play—surely already a
limited, very limited, conception of man—and of a conception of the dog that sees the highest
aspiration of that member of the animal kingdom as going for one more run by the river—
surely a limited conception of the life of a dog—we are still faced with this unwitting reductio
ad absurdum by an otherwise serious student of philosophy of the position that man is just
another member of the animal kingdom: since man is just another member of the animal
kingdom, why should he have a greater right to life than another member of the animal
kingdom, the dog?

The important thing to grasp is that these positions—and there are variants—arise from the
materialistic model that St Gregory himself has put forth as an argument against the
existence of a soul which survives the death of the person: only material things exist, and,
since the body disintegrates at death, where can the soul be? Of course, this view is
elaborated in modern philosophical anthropology in the manner we have sketched above:
not only is man only a material being, but, in accordance with the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis,
he is merely one species of living being among the many that arose in evolution; and we have
no way to say that he is in any way a better living being than any other.

Needless to say, this model has repercussions in theology and in the psychology of religious
experience. For if this model recognizes God at all, it recognizes him on the one hand as the
vague unity of the material world—there are of course variants—and on the other hand as a
merely subjective experience.

This model tends very strongly to the position—insofar as it does not reject talk about God as
mere sentimentalism—that all religions are the same: different human, subjective
experiences of that ‘divine’ unity of the material world just referred to, conditioned by the
cultural context—itself completely relative and equivalent—of the person who experiences
that ‘divine’ unity of the material world. Moreover, since the person is his brain, or the
functioning of his brain, such ‘divine’ experiences are the result of alterations to the ordinary
functioning of the brain induced by various practices uncovered here and there in various
cultures, which experiences empirically have been found to be effective in inducing the
desired mental state by means of an alteration to the normal functioning of the brain or part
of it.

A notable exponent of this view was Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), although he seems to have
had a somewhat more objective sense of the divine than we have sketched, and seems even to
have tended to a belief in reincarnation, at least in his later phases. The view that we have
sketched, however, is in general the view of humanistic psychology.

In this view, yoga, fasting, continence, prayer and such-like are all means to induce
alterations to the normal functioning of the brain, and, therefore, to the subjective mental
state of the person who wishes to have, for whatever reason, such subjective experiences.
Such experiences are merely that: experiences of unity seen in the context of a materialistic
philosophical and scientific paradigm. These experiences have no greater significance, for
the philosophical paradigm does not admit of the survival of the person after death, nor does
it admit of the transcendent: when the brain ceases to function, the experiences and the
person disappear. They are like a bubble which bursts and is gone. This is an image that St
Macrina herself uses.
Let us see what she says:

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[1] ‘Animals’ by Lori Gruen, in Singer p. 347.

Chapter I -- 6

And the teacher, having sighed tranquilly at those things which had been said,
herself said: Maybe these were the objections, or such as these, that the Stoics
and Epicureans gathered at Athens made in answer to the Apostle. I hear that
Epicurus carried his theories in this very direction. The nature of existent
things was conjectured to be by chance and spontaneous, as if there were no
Providence pervading through things. And, on account of this, by consequence,
he thought that human life was after the manner of a bubble, our body
enveloping a certain breath as long as the breath should be retained in that
which enveloped it; and that with the collapse of the volume, then the contents
were extinguished. For him, the limit of the nature of existent things was the
phenomenon, and he made the measure of the comprehension of everything,
sense,

Let us stop here.

The reference that St Macrina is making is to a passage of Acts of the Apostles, Acts 17, 16–
32, wherein St Paul the Apostle, in Athens, vexed at the city’s being full of idols, preaches
both in the synagogue of the Jews and in the Athenian marketplace, where he is met by some
of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who, indeed, being curious about what his ‘new
teaching’ might be, lead him to the Areopagus, where St Paul makes a defence of the
Christian faith to the Athenians there assembled.
Who were the Stoics? Stoicism was founded c.300 bc by Zeno of Citium (c.335–c.263 bc).

Stoicism can be described as follows: Stoicism is a monistic religious philosophy that posits
as the ultimate reality, God or the Word (Logos) or World-Soul, which is to be identified with
the primal fire of the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus (c.500 bc). The world is of the same
substance as the Stoic God, which emanates the elements of the world and the world itself.
The world is strictly subject to determinism, and the actions of men are strictly determined.
However, having freedom of consciousness, men are able, if they wish, to submit to the
dictates of Fate, and that is the goal of the Stoic. The world returns to the primal fire of the
World-Soul in a cosmic conflagration, after which the World-Soul again emanates the
elements of the world and the world itself. This cycle of world creation and world
conflagration exists eternally towards the past and towards the future, each world thus
created and annihilated being an exact duplicate of all the others, and including exactly the
same actions of exactly the same men who are engendered in each creation cycle. We
ourselves wonder whether this continual cycle of creation and annihilation of exactly the
same world is not to be understood so much serially, as positing an ontological simultaneity
of the creation and destruction of the one world, so that all phases of the creation and
destruction of the one world would exist simultaneously in an ontological hierarchy. P. P.
Hallie in his article on Stoicism in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarks: ‘For the Stoics,
things do not happen in time; time is a dimension of things.’[1] We are not sure what that
means, but perhaps it is an indication that the succession of identical worlds is not to be
taken in our own modern sense, serially.

In Stoicism, men have a soul, of a material nature. The ruling part of man (hegemonikon) is
a part of the World-Soul; therefore it is itself of the same nature as the Stoic God, fire. After
death, man’s soul survives[2] until the next cosmic conflagration, at which time it is resorbed
into the fire of the conflagration, when all things again return to the primal fire of the World-
Soul.

The goal of man is to live according to Nature. This is not to be taken, as we might take it
today, as living in a forest, since the Nature involved is precisely the World-Soul itself.
Another way of putting the goal is to live according to Reason: Reason and Nature are
synonymous with God, the World-Soul.
The Stoics developed a concept of ‘natural law’. This concept is precisely the concept of living
according to Reason or the World-Soul. Connected to this concept is the concept of doing
one’s duty (kathekon), which is not to be understood in our sense of ‘duty’, but as ‘what is
right, proper or fitting’.

The concept of natural law is also found in St Paul:

For when the nations, those who do not have the [Mosaic] Law, by nature do
those things of [i.e. required by] the Law, these who do not have the Law are the
Law in themselves, who show written in their hearts the work of the Law, their
conscience together bearing witness and the [i.e. their] thoughts among
themselves condemning or justifying [them] in the day when God judges the
secrets of men through Jesus Christ according to my Gospel.[3]

While there is obviously very little similarity between St Paul’s Gospel and Stoicism, we
wonder whether St Paul’s reference to the natural law in this passage of Romans does not
have some connection to the Stoic concept of natural law that was in the air in the epoch
when he preached. The Pauline concept of natural law entered of course into Orthodoxy, and
can easily be found in St John Chrysostom’s commentaries on Romans.[4] Moreover, as we
shall see in Chapter IV, the Roman Catholic Church relies very heavily on the concept of
natural law in its doctrine of man, especially in the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas, perhaps
developing the concept of natural law in a far more intensive manner than the Orthodox
Church, and moreover reducing the concept to a conformance with reason.

Be that as it may, the Stoic concept is a concept of living, or law, according to the dictates of
the World-Soul, who is also Reason or the Logos. Hence, the Stoics had a great interest in
logic, and made significant contributions to formal logic, and in a form different from the
Aristotelian syllogism.

There are several other Stoic concepts that must interest us. The Stoics’ had a theory of
cognition that was essentially empiricist; they spoke of the ‘representation’ of the object
which ‘imprinted’ the mind; this imprint was either accepted or rejected according to the
judgement of the man receiving the imprint. The Stoic psychology of cognition continues
with the stages of ‘comprehension’ and ‘science’. Evagrius Pontikos adopted at least the
terminology of ‘representation’ and ‘imprinting’ on the mind; he placed it in the context of an
ascetical psychology which seeks to surpass the imprintings of sensible objects, so that the
mind might attain to the imprintings of intelligible objects and ultimately to the imprinting
that comes from God himself. This clearly is the putting of the initial Stoic psychological
analysis into the framework of a Platonizing ascetical psychology. This matter forms a major
topic in Volume II and it also forms the basis of the Hesychasm of St Hesychios that we
discuss in Volume III.

The Stoics had a concept of ‘passion (pathos)’. They recognized four passions: pleasure,
desire, sorrow and fear. St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), as we shall see in Chapter IV, has
a similar doctrine of the four passions, one which he bequeathed to St Thomas Aquinas. For
the Stoics, the passions were negative and to be eradicated. Evagrius adopts the concept of
passion but his typology includes eight primary passions, and his analysis, as we shall learn
in Volume II, is very subtle: here he seems to have surpassed the Stoics.

The Stoics also had a concept of ‘dispassion (apatheia)’, and, indeed, the concept seems
originally to derive from them. We have been unable to judge from the secondary sources
that we have consulted on Stoicism[5] just what the Stoic concept of dispassion really was.
Western sources are often very weak on such matters, tending to treat the concept as one of
‘apathy’, which we understand to be a pathological absence of affect.

Evagrius also adopts into his system the concept of dispassion (apatheia), but with Evagrius
this is clearly the purification of the man from the tendencies to sin that he finds in himself,
not a pathological condition of affectlessness. In Evagrius, the attainment to a state of
dispassion is correlated with the acquisition of virtue and with the entry into the
contemplation.

An article, ‘Apatheia’, by G. Bardy in the Roman Catholic Dictionnaire de Spiritualité,[6]

indicates that the Stoic concept of dispassion (apatheia) was of a complete freedom from the
four (Stoic) passions, this leading to a freedom to practise one’s kathekon (to do what is
right, fitting or proper), to live in accordance with the dictates of Reason or the World-Soul
and to be indifferent to the vicissitudes of life: ‘The true sage must therefore deliver himself
from the passions, remain calm in the face of adversity and establish within himself a state of
peace which nothing can disturb.’[7]

The Stoics also had a concept of virtue, for them very important. A significant parallel
between the Stoic concept of virtue and the Evagrian concept of virtue is precisely that virtue
is one although it has many names. For the Stoics, the four cardinal virtues were prudence
(phronesis), courage (andreia), continence (enkrateia) and justice (dikaiosune). Evagrius
makes use of this schema, as does St Augustine; however this schema of the virtues is already
to be found in Plato’s Republic. The Stoics viewed the matter like this: either one had virtue,
all of it, or one had none. Evagrius does not adopt precisely this position.

Although we have not been able to learn much about it from our secondary sources, the
Stoics also had a concept and practice of asceticism. However, again, an article in the
Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, ‘Ascèse, Ascétisme’ by M. Olphe-Galliard,[8] helps us to
understand the outlines of Stoic asceticism. The function of ascesis in the Stoic system was to
regulate the choice and use by the man of things which were neither good nor bad in
themselves. This required the use of discernment, which is something that could be taught to
a man; and asceticism was the training of the judgement or discernment of the man. Hence,
the thrust of Stoic asceticism was in the training of the inner man: the Stoic ascetic applied
the ‘rule’ of discernment to all that he saw, to all that affected him emotionally whether for
good or for ill. This was the ascesis proper to the soul, distinguished from the ascesis of the
body, which was based on gymnastics and bodily endurance, although that bodily ascesis was
indeed considered to have a positive effect on the soul. The goal of the ascesis of the soul was
that the man judge things in their reality: this was the discernment that could be taught. This
ascesis of the soul reached the stage of the training of the man’s very thought processes.
There was also an emphasis on continence and moderation in one’s way of life, a de-
emphasis on learnedness. This asceticism was to produce constancy, equanamity, an abiding
moral rectitude and an impassibility in adversity. While there is not much that this sort of
asceticism has in common with the asceticism of Evagrius Pontikos or of the other authors
we shall study, the emphasis of the Stoics on training the thought processes is interesting, for
we shall see that a very important part of Evagrian asceticism is concerned with the thought
processes of the ascetic. Moreover, there is a similarity in the emphasis on moral rectitude.
To continue, the Stoics had a concept of the spermatikoi logoi of things in the world. Fr
Copleston remarks that this appears to be the injection of the Platonic forms into Stoic
materialism.[9] These spermatikoi logoi constitute the perfect exemplars of each thing in the
world and are contained in the Logos or World-Soul. As Fr Copleston puts it:

These active forms—but material—are as it were ‘seeds’, through the activity of which individual things
come into being as the world develops; or rather they are the seeds which unfold themselves in the
forms of individual things.’[10]

Fr Copleston continues that the concept is also to be found in Neoplatonism. This is

important, for it seems to us that the spermatikoi logoi of the Stoics are in Evagrius the
objects of contemplation known as the reasons (logoi) of created things. We do not know
whether Evagrius took the concept directly from the Stoics or through the medium of the
Neoplatonists or otherwise. St Augustine takes the concept of the eternal reasons (logoi) in
the Mind of God from the Neoplatonists, but, as we shall see in Chapter IV, his concept is
somewhat different from that of Evagrius: possibly Evagrius was influenced on the matter
both by the Neoplatonists and by the Stoics, or even by others.

In their ethics, the Stoics viewed moral culpability strictly on the basis of the disposition of
the man who committed the act. The various acts themselves they viewed as being, in and of
themselves, morally neutral. This is consistent with the Stoics’ notion that a man’s acts are
determined, although his conscious attitude towards his acts is free.

The Stoics had a concept of the sage. The sage is the man who has acquired dispassion and
virtue and who lives in accordance with the World-Soul or Reason. Such sages were quite
rare if they were to be found at all. Evagrius has a similar concept: it is the concept of the
‘gnostic’, the man who has attained to dispassion, who has entered into the first stage of
contemplation, the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of created things, and who has
undertaken to teach others. The similarity of Evagrius to the Stoics in this matter, as in the
other matters discussed above, appears at least in part to reflect Evagrius’ own dependence
on Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215), who himself was directly influenced by the Stoics,
and, again in part, also to reflect Evagrius’ dependence on his master, St Gregory the
Theologian, who also was influenced by Stoicism.
Finally, in middle Stoicism, the Stoic teacher Poseidonius (c.135–51 bc) introduced the idea
of man as the bond between the infralunar world, the earthly and perishable world, and the
supralunar world, the heavenly and imperishable world.[11] Composed of body and spirit,
man stands at the border of the two worlds, being the highest element of the perishable
infralunar world and the lowest element of the imperishable supralunar world. Moreover,
man’s knowledge includes the knowledge of the infralunar world and the knowledge of the
supralunar world and therefore binds the two worlds together. This concept of man as the
connecting link between the material and the spiritual worlds is also to be found in the works
of St Gregory the Theologian. Moreover, this position of middle Stoicism seems very close to
St Maximos the Confessor’s (580–662) own doctrine of the ‘cosmic liturgy’ of man, wherein
the vocation of man is to act as the connecting link between the material and spiritual worlds
and as the focal point for the divinization (theosis) of all creation. We will see these things in
Chapter V, below, where we will see that even St John of Damascus (680?–789?) has an echo
of the doctrine of man as a connecting link between the material and spiritual worlds.

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[1] Encyclopedia Volume 8, p. 21.

[2] This appears to be a doctrine which varied among Stoics in time and perhaps place.

[3] Rom. 2, 14–16.

[4] Chr–Rom G.

[5] Encyclopedia and Copleston.

[6] Dictionnaire Volume I, cols. 727 ff.

[7] Ibid. col. 727.

[8] Dictionnaire Volume I, cols. 936 ff. Section: ‘Le Stoïcisme’, cols. 953–7.

[9] Copleston Volume I, p. 388.

[10] Ibid. p. 389.

[11] See Copleston Volume I, p. 423.

Chapter I -- 7

Who were the Epicureans? Epicureanism was founded at roughly the same time as Stoicism
by Epicurus (341–270 bc).

Epicureanism can be described as follows: It is a materialistic philosophy based on

Democritus’ atomic theory. While ‘gods’ exist, they are composed of atoms—the finest atoms
—just as is the rest of every possible world, and they live in a condition of supreme bliss
completely detached from and indifferent to the present world and the affairs of men. All
things are composed of atoms; there are a finite number of elements whose compounds go to
make up all existent things. The natural movement of the atoms is downward (hence in
parallel) and at uniform speed, but these atoms have a certain limited ‘swerve’ which is
indeterminate (the ‘swerve’ introduces a non-deterministic element) and causes the
interaction of the atoms: this ‘swerve’ by its existence preserves the non-determined nature
of human experience, but its rather limited scope preserves the uniformity or regularity of
experience. The world is wholly due to mechanical causes.

There is an unlimited number of universes of similar types; the ‘gods’ live in the mid-regions
between the various universes.

The human is a compound of body and soul, neither of which can exist without the other.
Body and soul are each composed of atoms. The elements of the soul comprise just air, wind,
fire and a fourth element peculiar to the soul and nameless. After death, body and soul
disintegrate. Death is mere extinction, the complete absence of all consciousness and feeling.
No judgement and no punishment await men in the afterlife. ‘Death is nothing to us; for that
which is dissolved is devoid of sensation, and that which is devoid of sensation is nothing to
us.’[1]

Epicurus’ epistemology was empiricist: Man knows only on the basis of the data of sense-
perception, which results, in the case of sight, from images of the object seen, which images
are emanations of atoms from the object. Very fine emanations, for example those from the
‘gods’, can impress the mind directly without the mediation of the sense organs. Emanations
that have become scrambled in transit give rise to dreams and fantasies. Repeated
experiences of sense data received by the senses and preserved in the memory give rise to
‘anticipations (prolepseis)’ that are equivalent to concepts. This seems to be a notion of the
formation of a concept through the habituation of sense-perception. From concepts can be
formed opinions or judgements, which are tested either against the objects in the world or,
when the opinion is by nature untestable, by consistency with observable things and by a
criterion of the incompatibility with observable things of the negation of the opinion.

The passion of pleasure is the highest good; and the passion of pain, the greatest evil. All
statements about good and evil have meaning only with reference to the passions of pleasure
and pain. ‘The criteria of truth are the senses, the preconceptions [prolepseis] and the
passions.’[2]

The part of the soul that deals with sense-perception is spread throughout the body; the part
that thinks and feels is centred in the heart. There is no part of the self that is not strictly
dependent on sense-perception. However, man has free will.

Like all other atomic compounds, men come into being when the necessary conditions have been met
[i.e. the correct chain of preparatory events]. They have no creator and no destiny. Their good is
pleasure, their highest good a life of secure and lasting pleasure. United by no bond of nature, they form
alliances for mutual advantage, and they acquiesce in the restraints of law and government as a
protection against injury by their fellows. These measures, however, do not achieve a good life, because
of men’s false opinions. Men’s empty fears of the gods and of death destroy their peace of mind, and in
pursuing wealth, power, and fame they seek security where it cannot be found.

…The good life is attainable only by the philosopher. The immediate experience of pleasure, although
good in itself, does not bring with it a guarantee of permanence. Intelligent choice is also needed, and
 practical wisdom [i.e. prudence] … is more to be prized than philosophy itself. Practical wisdom [i.e.
prudence] measures pleasures against pain, accepting pains that lead to greater pleasures and rejecting
pleasures that lead to greater pains. It counts the traditional virtues (justice, temperance [i.e.
continence], courage, etc.) among the means for attaining the pleasant life; they have no other
justification.[3]

Note the role of prudence in calculating the relative value of each pleasure or pain that the
Epicurean might, in his free will, be faced with choosing or avoiding.

Epicurus had a twofold categorization of pleasures: First, those pleasures which are caused
by a motion and those which are states: eating choice foods is a pleasure caused by a motion;
not being hungry is a pleasure which is a state. Second, those pleasures which are pleasures
of the body and those which are pleasures of the mind. An example of a pleasure of the mind
which is caused by a motion is the joy at the well-being of the body; an example of a pleasure
of the mind which is a state is the serenity (ataraxia, literally, ‘freedom from disturbance’)
brought about by the removal of pains and cares. In general, the pleasures of the mind,
although subject to this twofold classification, are directly dependent on physical sense-
perception. Moreover, the good life is a life of pleasures of the body and of the mind which
are states: these states can be indefinitely prolonged, whereas the pleasures caused by a
motion either in body or in mind are ephemeral. In order to be able to meet adversity, the
wise man builds up reserves of pleasures in his memory of the types listed above, given their
hierarchical valuation by Epicurus, so that during the course of the adversity he can dwell in
his mind on those pleasures of the past and on the anticipation of the pleasures of the future.
However, serenity (ataraxia) is attained when the study of (Epicurean) philosophy has
removed the fear of the ‘gods’ and when death is recognized to be the limit of experience, but
not the determinant of the quality of the experience lived before death, and when the
gratification of desires that go beyond the necessary and the natural is seen to result in
greater pains than pleasures.

As Fr Copleston presents Epicurus’ views, there is a tendency that can be discerned to a

utilitarian view of justice and injustice—utilitarian as seen from the framework of Epicurus’
hedonistic ethic, which itself was egoistic. As Epicurus himself is said to have put it:
 When, without any fresh circumstances arising, a thing which has been declared
just in practice does not agree with the impressions of reason, that is a proof that
the thing was not really just. In the same way, when in consequence of new
circumstances, a thing which has been pronounced just does not any longer
appear to agree with utility, the thing which was just, inasmuch as it was useful
to the social relations and intercourse of mankind, ceases to be just at the
moment when it ceases to be useful.[4]

We are struck by the contemporary ring of Epicureanism.

Both Stoicism and Epicureanism, founded later than Aristotle’s philosophy, played an
important role in the Classical and late Classical Ages before the prevailing of Christianity in
the Mediterranean basin. However, it should be clear that what St Gregory has said in his
arguments against the existence of a soul that survives the death of the person is far more
consistent with Epicurean than with Stoic philosophy. St Macrina has introduced the Stoics
into her reply merely on the basis of the passage in Acts to which she refers.

As will be evident, the tenets of Epicureanism are, as a materialistic philosophy that denies a
‘Providence pervading through things’, quite important today. For Epicureanism is founded
on the same materialistic philosophy as the modern paradigm in biology that we have
already been discussing, and it draws the same ethical conclusions from that materialistic
philosophy as are being drawn, say, from logical positivism by ethicists today.

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[1] Epicurus, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, 10, 139, as quoted in Copleston Volume I, p. 404.

[2] Epicurus, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, 10, 31, as quoted in Copleston Volume I, p. 403.

[3] Encyclopedia Vol. 3, p. 4.

[4] Epicurus, in Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Philosophers, 10, Maxim 42, as quoted in Copleston Volume I, p. 409.
We have followed quite closely the presentation of P. H. De Lacy in ‘Epicurus’, Volume 3, pp. 3–5 of The Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Encyclopedia). We recommend the full article. However, we have supplemented De Lacy’s
presentation with material from Fr Copleston’s description of Epicureanism, Chapter XXXVII of Copleston Volume I,
including the quotations of Epicurus given

Chapter I -- 8

An example of a modern variant of the Epicurean point of view is found in Le hasard et la

nécessité (Chance and Necessity),[1] written by Jacques Monod (1910–1976), the Nobel
laureate who discovered the role of messenger RNA and who introduced the concept of
operon, or functional unit of genes and control centres on the chromosome.

Monod prefaces his work with two quotations that seem to us, despite some further
complexities of his thought, particularly apt—more apt than most quotations which preface
books—to capture what he wants to say. The first quotation is from Democritus: ‘Everything
that exists in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.’ For on the basis of his
experience as a biologist, Monod explicitly advances a materialistic and mechanistic
philosophy: the chance in Monod’s system, as regards the nature of man, is the chance
nature of mutations to the DNA, the bearer of the genetic information of every living
organism; the necessity is the severity of natural selection which pitilessly evaluates the
usefulness of the mutation.

There are complications. Unusually for a modern biologist, Monod insists on a concept of
teleology as necessary for the explanation of living systems; indeed, his teleology, which he
calls téléonomie, is precisely a characteristic of the biological system taken as system—a
materialistic and mechanistic system, no doubt; on that he is emphatic—but a system
nonetheless. It appears to us that the insight that Monod wishes to preserve by reference to
the concept of téléonomie is the concept of order and directedness in a system. He himself
uses the comparison of the eye and the camera. Just as the artefact called the camera cannot
be understood without reference to the purpose for which it is made, so a biological system
such as the eye cannot be understood properly without reference to the purpose of the eye. It
is clear from Monod’s examples in molecular biology that he has in mind the idea that a
molecular biological system is a directed cybernetic system with control loops. By ‘directed’
we mean that the system has a ‘point’, a function or work (ergon). The relevance of this
concept is this, among others: A mutation, say a point mutation—chance—that results in a
slight change to a protein that is an active structural component of a biological cybernetic
system, is evaluated by natural selection—necessity—in part by the degree of fit of that
mutated protein to the ensemble of the cybernetic system. To pass the test of natural
selection (necessity) the mutation (chance) cannot inter alia degrade the system’s structure
and performance as system, without, presumably, providing some other compensating or
more than compensating advantages in the response of the system to its environment. The
criterion of the teleonomic fit of the mutation is therefore a criterion of fitness internal to the
system, and it is complementary to the more usual criterion of the fitness of the mutated
system to its environment. This seems to us well-founded to the extent, at least, that it is a
recognition that a biological system—at whatever level of analysis—has a specific structure,
even if that structure be abstract. Moreover, when the concept is applied to the system of
development of the organism, something Monod does not do, it seems to us very useful.
However, among Anglo-American biologists, such an insistence on teleology would most
likely be considered a paradigm violation.

The second quotation that Monod provides to preface his book is a quotation from The Myth
of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (1913–1960). This is Camus’ metaphor of the absurdity of
human existence—Monod later explicitly states that he prefers strangeness to absurdity as a
characterization of human existence—taken from the myth of Sisyphus, who patiently and
agonizingly rolls the rock uphill, only to have it roll down again. It is clear that Camus means
that each pushing uphill is a human life, futile, absurd and punctuated by the complete and
final nothingness of death. Monod’s argument is that science has put man, especially in the
developed societies, in the position of Sisyphus because that science has deprived man of all
the projective—‘animist’[2]—systems of religion and philosophy that hid from man his
existential predicament: he is alone in an indifferent universe; he plays his life out on the
stage of the world; he goes to nothingness.

While this is very much what one might call the ethical dimension of his thought, Monod has
a complicated development concerning the nature of man that uses Monod’s own version of
the theory of evolution coupled to molecular genetics at the level of elucidation that was
current in 1970, the date of his work. This theory might be described as Cartesianism
injected into a strictly materialistic and mechanistic framework. For God is gone in Monod’s
system; all the metaphysical trappings of Cartesian dualism are gone—except for a certain
dualism expressed in a strictly materialistic context and depending for its elucidation on a
theory, tenuous in the extreme, of the development in evolution of man’s mind through the
play of chance and necessity on the central nervous system of the progenitors of man,
coupled with the directedness of evolution conferred by the teleonomic aspects of man’s use
of language. This is clearly a doctrine of ‘epiphenomenalism’, the philosophical doctrine that
while the human mind is not precisely the same thing as the brain, it is an efflorescence of
brain activity that occurred by chance at a certain point in man’s evolution. The result, in
Monod’s view, is that, on the one hand, Cartesian innate ideas or Kantian a priori categories
of thought are inherent in the structures of the human central nervous system, structures
that are real and objective and that have developed in evolution through chance and
necessity; and that, on the other hand, man is a link between the biosphere and the
‘Kingdom of Ideas’. We are struck by Monod’s image of man as the link between the physical
and the noetic realms: we have already seen that this Stoic idea was taken up by St Gregory
the Theologian and St Maximos the Confessor, but in a Christian mystical context. Monod
has the same idea but has injected it into a materialistic and mechanistic system that makes
provision for a spiritual realm of ideas only, a realm that Monod explicitly says developed
when man’s capacity for abstract thought, verbal communication and cultural evolution
crossed a certain threshold in his physical evolution.

Where does Monod end up? In an ethic of knowledge, which makes the primary value the
free acceptance of the postulate of the objectivity of knowledge, which, Monod believes, is
the basis of all that scientific progress that on the one hand has liberated man from all the
‘animisms’ of religion and philosophy and on the other hand has destroyed Western culture,
all the while reinforcing the existential loneliness of man in the universe. That objectivity of
knowledge and its related ethic seem to be Monod’s reflection on the logical positivism of the
Twentieth Century, that logical positivism which relegated metaphysics, religion and ethics
to the dustbin of meaningless discourse or emotional self-expression. For, he says, we must
both recognize the separateness of knowledge and ethics, making a commitment to
knowledge as the supreme value—he even puts forward the idea of a spiritual asceticism of
knowledge!—and recognize the necessity of ethics, at the same time refusing to avoid the
existential reality and anxiety of man’s isolation in the universe. As he himself puts it:

The ancient alliance [i.e. the intimacy between man and the universe created by
the ‘animisms’ of religion and philosophy which hid from man his existential
 predicament] has been broken; man finally knows that he is alone in the
indifferent immensity of the universe from which he has emerged by chance. No
more than his destiny, his duty is written nowhere. It is for him to choose
between the Kingdom and the darkness.[3]

Clearly Monod begins with the premises we have been discussing: a materialistic and
mechanistic philosophy and a complete alienation, except on the level of nostalgia, from
religion. He is a cultured materialist, strongly anti-Marxist, finally an avowed socialist
humanist.

What we can infer from Le hasard et la nécessité is two things: First, that among scientists
today there is a very great alienation from religion, a very great insistence on the
materialistic and mechanistic paradigm as being not merely methodological but
metaphysical, as being metaphysically imposed by the very nature of scientific discovery and
as being validated or verified by the great fruit that that method has borne over the past
three centuries since the Enlightenment. Second, that it is possible to build more than one
building on that foundation. Epicureanism is one building; a socialist humanism founded on
existential reflection on man’s isolation in the universe, another. Marxism is a third option,
one that Monod is at pains to disparage on scientific grounds. Monod’s own reflections strike
us as arising out of the French cultural milieu; Epicureanism seems to us far more consistent
with the presuppositions that Monod himself has. Not all men are so personally cultured as
Monod. Not all men have the strength to live on the razor’s edge of existential anxiety in the
face of the indifference of the immense universe. And it is a very small step to Epicureanism.

It is well worth noting that David Hume, the central figure in the English Enlightenment—we
are really concentrating in this work on the Anglo-American philosophical tradition—himself
makes explicit use of the figure of Epicurus to put forth some of his own more audacious and
evidently dangerous views. We wonder to what extent Hume was not in fact explicitly
influenced by Epicurus’ philosophy in the development of his own views.

This explicit use of Epicurus was made by Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (1748), where, in Section XI, ‘Of a Particular Providence and of a Future
State’, he puts forward the figure of Epicurus—through the device of an ‘Epicurean friend’
who invents a speech in Epicurus’ name—in order to prove that:
 …[W]hen, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence [i.e. the
existence of a God who interests himself in and ordains the affairs of men and
the world] and a future state [i.e. life after death], I undermine not the
foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves [i.e. the
religious philosophers who according to ‘Epicurus’ try to found the claims of
religion on reason, especially by means of the argument of the Weaver from the
garment, advanced by St Macrina below], upon their own topics, if they argue
consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.[4]

But what is St Macrina saying? So far, the argument has hinged on the survival or not after
death of ‘that vivifying principle’, the soul. As we have indicated, that there might be such a
vivifying principle is challenged today; however, the basis of all the modern arguments
against the concept and existence of the soul is a materialistic conception of the universe, a
materialistic conception in philosophy.

St Macrina, first, is attaching the view that the soul, ‘that vivifying principle’, cannot survive
death to its source, the Epicureans. Next, focusing on Epicurus, St Macrina states that his
philosophy was materialistic and probabilistic and ‘with no Providence pervading through
things’.

As we have indicated, modern physics, the paradigm of modern science, is materialistic and
without a Providence pervading through things; and in particle physics, it is probabilistic.
Moreover, modern biology is also materialistic and without a Providence pervading through
things; it is also probabilistic, even though it cannot yet be considered to be probabilistic in
the same sense as quantum mechanics. We have provided the views of Watson and his fellow
authors, and also those of Monod, as two sketches of such views. We have also indicated
some consequences for the doctrine of the person that follow from such views, looking both
at the issue of brain death and at the humanistic philosophy and psychology of religious
experience.

In our view, these are the dominant views in the West today. There are certainly other views
—we cannot present a history of every philosophy present today in the West—but those are
not the views that have a predominant position in government, science, taken as a social
institution, the courts and society. We think that these materialistic views are.
In St Macrina’s view, some consequences follow immediately. First, human life is considered
to be like a bubble, and the duration of the bubble is the duration of life in the body.
Moreover, she has already mentioned the ill effects on one’s attitude to virtue that arise from
such a line of reasoning: this line of reasoning turns one to look to the present pleasure
alone.

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[1] Monod.

[2] Monod’s term.

[3] Monod p. 225; our translation.

[4] Hume–Under p. 407.

Chapter I -- 9

Let us look briefly at the evolution of philosophical anthropology (or philosophical

psychology) and ethics in the Anglo-American tradition. We are most interested in English
Utilitarianism and its offshoots.

Let us start in the High Middle Ages. Before the Twelfth Century, two works of Aristotle were
known in the West, both of them logical works. They were studied in great detail. In the
Twelfth Century, almost all of Aristotle’s works were translated into Latin, in some cases
from the Arabic; by the middle of the Thirteenth Century, new translations from the Greek
had been made. These included Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. However, while Aristotle’s
On the Soul was studied quite intensively, until the Fifteenth Century the Nicomachean
Ethics played a distinctly secondary role in the curricula of the newly-founded great
universities of the West.
What we can infer from this is that until St Thomas Aquinas’ (1225–1274) assimilation of
Aristotle’s ethics into his theological system, philosophical ethics was not an important
matter in the mediæval faculties of Arts and Theology. We believe that this was due to the
theological and Christian orientation of the universities: philosophical ethics did not seem to
the masters of the Middle Ages to offer much.

We can also assert that characteristic of mediæval Scholastic philosophy was a very intense
concentration on logic and applied logic. The reader can get a sense of the intellectual
preparation of the mediæval Scholastic in logic and applied logic by considering the
preparation that a student receives today in mathematics and applied mathematics at M.I.T.,
that great university of the application of mathematics to engineering. The level of
instruction is about the same in both cases. However, given that the student entered the
University of Paris at the age of about fourteen and studied twenty years for his doctorate, it
might even be said that his preparation was even more intense than what a student receives
today at M.I.T.

The intellectual culture of the mediæval Scholastic was intensely analytical and logical;
discussions among philosophers and, above all, theologians, took place among men who
shared this very intense intellectual preparation and culture in logic and applied logic, just
as, today, discussions among scientists in physics, say, take place among men of very intense
intellectual preparation and culture in mathematics and applied mathematics. Moreover,
given the very young age of entry and the continuous preparation over many years of the
mediæval student, it is reasonable to suppose that this intellectual culture was very deeply
embedded in the psyche of the student, even more than today would be the case with a
physicist of the first rank. That is why we find mediæval theologians producing and
defending complete systems even while dying at an early age: their very intense preparation
enabled them to do mature work very early. It is also why we find a great agreement on
fundamentals among mediæval theologians and philosophers.

It is worth remarking that it is very difficult to ‘resuscitate’ such an intellectual culture once
it has died out: what is resuscitated is the system that interests one, not the intellectual
culture. That is what happened with Scholasticism: what remains is a system, notably, in the
Roman Catholic Church, Thomism, but without the same level of intellectual preparation in
logic and applied logic and without the same universality and intensity of intellectual culture.
It is as if modern science were to die out one day as a living force, and the world were to lose
the concentration on mathematics and applied mathematics that exists today in the hard
sciences in the great universities of the West—say, in favour of mysticism. Then after a time,
some men, perhaps, would want to resuscitate the science of the Twentieth Century, one
saying that he is a follower of quantum mechanics, another saying that he is a follower of the
general theory of relativity, all the while in a social milieu completely divorced from the
intellectual preparation and intellectual culture in mathematics and applied mathematics of
the Twentieth Century that engendered quantum mechanics and the general theory of
relativity. These men might study mathematics as best they could—and in cases of genius,
they might even make significant contributions—, but it would not be the same: the science
of the Twentieth Century would have died out as a cultural reality.

The next thing that we can assert is that, although prior to the Twelfth Century very little of
Aristotle was known in the West and although the dominant model of man was based on a
Neoplatonic conception having its origin in the works of St Augustine, the assimilation of
Aristotelian philosophy in the subsequent centuries led to the manipulation of Aristotelian
concepts with the logical tools to which we have just referred. This is true even in cases
where the theologian or philosopher continued to follow the older Augustinian tradition: the
reception into Roman Catholicism of Aristotelian philosophy marked Roman Catholic
theology and philosophy indelibly. This surely gave a certain cast to the intellectual culture of
the High Middle Ages even apart from the matter of the intense concentration on logic and
applied logic. One can say with confidence that it is these two factors, Aristotelian concepts
and intense preparation in logic, which give St Thomas Aquinas’ system its colour and
intellectual style. One aspect of this assimilation of Aristotle is the relatively uncritical and
accepting attitude that was shown to Aristotle. Certainly the reception of Aristotle was not
without its opponents, but among Aristotle’s adherents, Aristotle ‘could do no wrong’—even,
as in St Thomas’ case, when a certain critical spirit was applied to him in the light of Roman
Catholic dogma. One does not see this attitude in the East, among people who continued to
read Aristotle in the original. There, one had a more flexible attitude. This is an aspect of
what we have already remarked: the impossibility of resuscitating an intellectual culture over
and above a system. Aristotle was received into the Western universities as a system not as
an intellectual culture; his works were embedded as system into a different intellectual
culture. The East maintained far more continuity, at least until the fall of Constantinople,
with the intellectual culture of Ancient Greece and could therefore treat Aristotle with a more
critical and discerning eye.

The third aspect of the culture of the period is that it was an intensely Christian and Roman
Catholic culture. For us in discussing the evolution of psychology and ethics in the Anglo-
American philosophical tradition, the significance of this is that for the mediæval Scholastic,
God exists; angels exist; intelligible things exist;[1] the conception of man is fundamentally
Christian and, it goes to say, Roman Catholic. Moreover, religion is not merely a formal
institution to which men pay lip-service: many of the great thinkers of the Middle Ages were
men who willingly entered religious orders or otherwise served their church. They believed.
They took their salvation seriously. This is not to say that they all were saints incapable of
folly; it is to say that they were sincere Christians and Roman Catholics. Hence, for the most
part, logic and applied logic and Aristotelian concepts were applied to Christian things, and
as understood by the Roman Catholic Church.

This culture died in the Fifteenth Century. Why is beyond the scope of this work.

It is well worth remarking on one thing, however: Although modern science arose in severe
reaction against the values of the High Middle Ages, including the intellectual culture that we
have just sketched above, it itself is a phenomenon of the West. By this we mean that modern
science is a product of the West, that very West that went through those High Middle Ages
with that very intellectual culture that modern science has rejected so vehemently. Even in
those parts of the world where modern science is done that are not parts of the West, modern
science is done today in a derivative manner that depends on the intellectual leadership of
the West.[2] That leads us to pose this question: could modern science have developed in the
West had the West not gone through the High Middle Ages? We think not. Without wishing
to develop a theory of the evolution of cultures from lower to higher, we think that the High
Middle Ages prepared the West both institutionally and intellectually for the enterprise of
modern science.

But let us return to the evolution of ethics and psychology in the Anglo-American tradition.
The culture of the High Middle Ages was replaced by Renaissance Humanism, with its
emphasis on rhetoric instead of logic, its emphasis on the Classical use of Latin and Greek
according to ancient prototypes, its emphasis on studies in rhetoric, language, law and
politics as a preparation for public service. It is in this milieu, curiously enough, that
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was studied with great interest. Needless to say, it is also in
this cultural context that the Protestant Reformation, to a large extent a reaction against the
intellectual culture of the High Middle Ages, came to be born. A key figure was Erasmus
(c.1469–1536). He did much to discredit the intellectual culture of the High Middle Ages, not
so much with his argumentation as with his ridicule. However, the great fame to which he
attained in his own lifetime indicates that this ridicule mirrored widespread dissatisfaction
with the status quo.

It is also in this context that the Enlightenment came to be born.

What interests us here, and we are not historians of ideas, is the rejection in the
Enlightenment of those characteristics of the High Middle Ages that we have indicated
above: the emphasis on logic and applied logic, the Aristotelian philosophy, the Christian
and Roman Catholic intellectual, moral and spiritual culture: the Enlightenment rejected
these.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), contemporary and interlocutor of Galileo Galelei (1564–

1642), witness of the Commonwealth in England (1649–1660), refugee in France (1640–
1651), marks a transition from the High Middle Ages. Having rejected the Aristotelianism
that he studied at Oxford and having encountered the mechanistic physics of Galileo,
Hobbes’ program became the creation of a philosophical system based strictly on mechanical
physics as he understood it, and on the logical clarity of geometry, taken to be a science of
primitive motions in mechanics. His philosophy was strictly materialistic and mechanistic.
His psychology followed his philosophy.

Hobbes’ account of sense-perception is, to us today, crudely mechanistic: sense-perceptions

are nothing but motions; motions of an object impinging on the sense organ, motions within
the sense organ, motions that are transmitted to the brain and heart, motions in the brain
and heart. Hobbes applies Galileo’s physics in a direct way to explain various aspects of
human psychology such as memory and imagination. Given his strictly materialistic and
mechanistic psychology, Hobbes was led to deny freedom of the will, treating it merely as a
freedom from external constraint, for what a man desires, and hence wills to do, is
mechanically determined by the motions within him. Pleasure and pain are described within
the same mechanistic framework; pleasure and pain are intimately related to appetite and
aversion, which are themselves very closely related to love and hate. Social life is based on
these ‘passions’ or motivations; it is inherently selfish and self-aggrandizing: the rational
constraints necessary for the peace and security of the individual give rise to the social
contract for the overriding authority of the state.

John Locke (1632–1704) can be considered to be the first British empiricist. He resolutely
based all human knowledge on experience, directly refuting the innate ideas of Descartes
(1596–1650). Beyond this, however, he was also a rationalist with a sense of the existence of
mind. In general, his psychology was based on these two aspects of his philosophy. He
rejected freedom of the will.

Although the Enlightenment put human reason first, this must be understood in the sense of
the rejection of revealed truth: the merest perusal of David Hume indicates that he has
nothing to do with the logic and applied logic of the High Middle Ages. Characteristic is
Hume’s assertion that he wishes to follow in philosophy Newton’s methods in physics. What
this seems to entail is an emphasis on sensible phenomena, which were to be handled by
Newton’s experimental method and by the restriction of hypotheses to the empirically
verifiable.

Moreover, it is clear in Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that by his

time there has occurred a thoroughgoing rejection of the intellectual culture of the High
Middle Ages: we see Hume’s insistence in his theory of cognition on the crucial role of sense-
perception, and his consequently rather forced treatment of concept formation, in this light;
in this, he seems to us to be reacting vehemently against both the Aristotelian and Christian
or Roman Catholic intellectual culture of his time, a remnant of the intellectual culture of the
High Middle Ages. What he puts in its place is a rather impoverished theory of cognition
based on sense-perception. Kant, a child of Hume, recognizing the weakness of Hume’s
theory, will come to introduce his innate mental categories as a corrective.
But what must interest us is that Hume did much the same thing in ethics that he did in his
theory of cognition: he rejected the past and put a weak theory in its place. His ethics is
based on sympathy—feeling or emotion might be a better description—and on the customary
behaviour of mankind.

Let us look at Hume’s philosophy in a little more detail.

Hume based his theory of cognition on ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’. Impressions were sense-
perceptions, passions (e.g. a pain) or emotions. Ideas were copies of impressions recalled or
imagined in the mind. However, Hume then rejected the existence of mind.

One basic proposition of Hume was that every simple idea was derived from a corresponding
impression. This, of course, had the effect of limiting human mental life to that which can be
derived from sense-perceptions, passions and emotions. This involved the formulation of an
early form of the ‘verification principle’ of logical positivism: if an utterance could not be
analysed into ultimate constituents referring to impressions, then the utterance was to be
taken to be meaningless. To deal with abstract concepts, Hume invoked a doctrine of the
association of ideas: ideas whose impressions were alike, or contiguous in space or time
became associated in the mind. One consequence of this approach was to treat ‘mind’ as a
‘bundle’ of mental images of sense-perceptions, passions or emotions: that is, our
introspective apprehension of our mind—our apprehension of our own consciousness—is
merely of a bundle of impressions and ideas. This is curiously close to the position of
Theravada Buddhism.

In ethics, Hume took the position that when we make a moral judgement about a character
trait or an act of another person, our judgement is a matter of our feelings of pleasure or
displeasure, approval or disapproval, endorsement or revulsion, and not a matter of our
reason:

Hume’s theory of morals may be considered under three heads: his contention that reason alone cannot
decide moral questions, his contention that a “moral sentiment” decides such questions, and his
contention that the moral sentiment is actuated only by what is either pleasant or useful. In the first two
contentions can be seen the beginnings of modern subjectivism… In the third can be seen one of the
origins of the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill.[3]
Hume did have a notion of the universalizability of moral judgements, but placed this in the
context of his theory that moral judgements were based on the ‘moral sentiment’. Our own
remark is this: to what extent can a serious theory of morals be based on feelings of approval
or disapproval, even extended by appeals to feelings of sympathy or by appeals to utility?
That this is a serious issue can be seen from Hume’s handling of justice. Evidently rejecting
every theory of natural law, he treated justice as an artificial human construct, useful to men
for the preservation of private property. We see here a tendency which increased in the later
philosophy of this school: when objective criteria such as natural law or the commandments
of God are discarded in a theory of ethics, there then arises a tendency to derive ethics either
from subjective human considerations or from utilitarian considerations—which is precisely
what Hume’s theory of justice does.

Hume’s political philosophy was generally contractual and utilitarian, although he himself
was a conservative.

Clearly, Hume also rejected the survival of the soul after death. His approach to religion,
moreover, is to a natural religion not based on revelation.

It is well to turn here to the last sentence of what St Macrina has said in the last passage of
On the Soul and the Resurrection that we quoted: ‘For him [i.e. Epicurus] the limit of the
nature of existent things was the phenomenon, and he made the measure of the
comprehension of everything, sense.’

What St Macrina is saying is that for Epicurus, only the phenomenon existed—here
‘phenomenon’ has the meaning ‘sensible phenomenon’—, and man’s only possibility of
comprehension was through the senses. Precisely the positions that one can discern in Hume
and in his descendants. At the very least, the reader must grasp that Christians of the Fourth
Century had a much broader idea of what existed: although they did not share in the
intellectual culture of the Western High Middle Ages, they were much closer to it in their
basic presuppositions and understandings of life than they were either to Epicurus or to
Hume between whom we can see such a striking correspondence.
Hume set the stage for the evolution of ethics in the Anglo-American tradition. For Hume’s
basic anthropology—what we have indicated above—remained untouched. One’s
anthropology or psychology necessarily forms the presupposition of one’s ethics: if one
believes that one knows only from sense-perception, and that abstract concepts are somehow
formed strictly by the association of the mental images of sense-perceptions, passions and
emotions recalled in a mind which ultimately does not exist, as we find in Hume, then one is
not going to have much to build on in a theory of ethics. Moreover, if one believes, to use St
Gregory of Nyssa’s earlier phrase, that ‘the present life is considered to be the delimitation of
being and nothing more is hoped for after this life’, then one is left, as Hume was, with
sympathy and the customary behaviour of mankind as a basis for one’s moral philosophy.

Let us make a remark here about Kant, although he cannot really be considered to be in the
Anglo-American tradition. Two aspects of Kant’s ethics interest us here: his attempt to found
his ethics solely on reason, and his emphasis on the person as an individual agent who must
ground his deontological obligation on a universal principle. Both these aspects seem to us to
say something important about the evolution of philosophical psychology in the West: the
person is treated in Kant as an atom, let us say, an atom unconnected to other atoms except
through the requirements of a right reason: by reason, I, an agent or end, come to respect the
other atom, or person, as agent or end. We are struck by both the rationalism and the
individualism implied by this approach. The unit or perspective of analysis is very much the
isolated, autonomous individual whose point of reference is abstract reason. This certainly
marks a change from the sociology of the High Middle Ages, where a person was seen to exist
in a network of reciprocal social roles and obligations ruled over by a church founded by
divine revelation.

We cannot say that Kant invented this individualistic point of view; it is implicit already in
the Hobbesian ‘social contract’, itself derived from the logical procedure of making the
individual prior to society. As an empirical proposition, this does not seem to have any
support from observational sociology or observational social anthropology; but as a method,
or even as a myth, it clearly places the individual first, and prior to society.

Today, in ethics in the West, individualism is very strong indeed. It has evolved to what one
writer has called a ‘liberal contractualism’: ‘A liberal contractualism is very much part of our
ethical life in the post-modern West, whether we acknowledge it or not.’[4] Persons who
contract are autonomous agents with their own self-interests. ‘Liberal’ here has the meaning
‘free’. This ‘liberal contractualism’ is very similar to the Epicureanism that we discussed
earlier.

However, in the West today, rationalism is no longer a significant factor in ethics.

The Nineteenth Century British Utilitarians went a little further than Hume. They spoke
socially and of an evaluation of the consequences of a moral act as opposed to an evaluation
of the disposition of the agent; they discussed a rational calculus, or method of calculation, of
the greatest happiness for the greatest number, where happiness was intrinsically defined in
terms of pleasure. Now today there are variations in Utilitarianism: some versions of
Utilitarianism are oriented to happiness; some to economic gain; some to pleasure. But
Utilitarians retain the anthropology, at least in its broad outlines, that they inherited from
the English Enlightenment: one can rationally calculate the greatest good for the greatest
number of men, men seen through the prism of the anthropology and the limitation of
human life to life in this flesh that we have discussed above in reference to Hume.

The logical positivists took things to their logical conclusion. They rejected talk about God
and ethics as mere emotion. As a practical matter, their ethics is libertarian—one does
whatever one likes—and consequentialist (i.e. broadly utilitarian): one does whatever one
likes so long as one does not harm himself or others, and in social policy one tries to help the
greatest number to have the basic presuppositions of a decent life. The anthropology of the
logical positivists is certainly in the mould that we have been discussing.

The analytic philosophers, associated with the work of such men as Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976)
and the later Wittgenstein, turned to the logical analysis of concepts used in ordinary
discourse. Their work has born much fruit in the clarification of certain concepts and is not
lacking in subtlety; however, as a philosophical school, it is in the Anglo-American empiricist
tradition, and its adherents work on the basis of the assumptions of that tradition about
man, religion and the world, assumptions which for the most part seem to be unspoken and
unacknowledged, unrealized and not reflected upon.
If we combine the autonomous individualism that arose in the Enlightenment with the
consequentialism of the Utilitarians and the tendency of the Twentieth Century positivists to
dismiss talk about God and ethics as emotion, what is the result?

The result is that in the West we have come full circle: we have returned to the Epicureanism
that St Macrina discusses in a conversation that took place in the Fourth Century.

Now, how does St Macrina respond to this?

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[1] In the way Aristotle said they did, of course, unless someone, such as St John Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308) or William
of Ockham (c.1285–1349), were disposed to disagree.

[2] Of course, this remark treats the United States as a child of the European culture that went through the High Middle
Ages.

[3] D. G. C. MacNabb, ‘David Hume’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Encyclopedia Vol. 4, p. 85). We have made use
of material from this article in our presentation of Hume’s philosophy.

[4] David Wong in ‘Relativism’, Singer p. 448

Chapter I -- 10

having absolutely closed the senses [or, faculties] of the soul

Truly, modern philosophy rejects the existence of such senses or faculties: this is the
significance of the insistence of Hume and of his successors on the exclusive role of sense-
perception and on the exclusive role of the association of mental images of sense-
perceptions, passions and emotions in concept formation. Hume and his successors are
reacting vehemently against the very elaborate anthropology and psychology of the High
Middle Ages, an anthropology and a psychology that were at once either Platonizing or
Aristotelian, extremely logically refined, and, as Christian, accepting of such things as God,
angels, intelligible (non-material) substances, and, in some cases, what might be called
spiritual senses. However, these senses or faculties of the soul, which do not depend on
sense-perception, will be very important to us as we develop the psychology of mental prayer
in the heart.

and being able to see nothing of the intelligible and bodiless.

What does this mean? There is a basic polarity involved here: sensible – intelligible. The
sensible is what can be perceived by means of the bodily sense organs. The intelligible is
what exists but which can only be apprehended by thought or by a mental or spiritual faculty
or sense. A rock is sensible. An angel is intelligible. An angel is also bodiless. The reason
(logos) of the rock, what it was meant to be, is intelligible. What it means to be ‘apprehended
by a mental or spiritual faculty or sense’ will be made clear with extraordinary precision by
Evagrius Pontikos, whose ascetical system we will discuss in Volume II, although we shall
also encounter the notion in this volume in Chapter III. In modern philosophical language,
these mental or spiritual faculties or senses are said to involve apprehension by intuition—
direct perception or cognition by the mind (nous) without the intervention of propositional
reasoning (ratiocination)—; here, the intuition is applied to non-sensible (intelligible) things
that exist.

St Macrina has responded to the materialistic arguments against the existence of a soul
which survives death by immediately introducing the notion of the intelligible. She
continues:

just as a person imprisoned in a small house remains unseeing of the heavenly

wonders, being prevented by the walls and the roof from the view outside the
house. Really, all sensible things are earthen walls, as many things as are seen
in the universe, creating walls by means of themselves for the more mean of
spirit in regard to the contemplation of intelligible things.
The last sentence has its roots in Plato, for example the Phaedo, where it defines the
character of Platonic mysticism and asceticism. It will be of fundamental importance to us as
we develop our psychological analysis of mental prayer in the heart, but let us let St Macrina
finish:

Such a person sees earth only, and air and fire and water.

We would say today: carbon and oxygen and carbohydrates and nucleic acids and photons.

Whence come each of these things or in whom it is or by whom it is maintained,

such persons because of their meanness of soul cannot discern. And one seeing
a garment has reckoned the weaver; and through the ship has conceived of the
shipwright; and the hand of the builder comes to the intellect of those who look,
along with the sight of that which was built; but those who look at the world are
dull of sight towards him who is declared by means of these things. Whence
these wise and shrewd things are offered by those who proclaim the vanishing
of the soul: the body from the elements, the elements from the body and the
assertion that the soul is unable to exist by itself, but only if it is one of the
elements or in the elements.

First, the Platonic idea that sensible things prevent one from seeing intelligible things: This
is fundamental to the Evagrian ascetical system that is the subject of Volume II. It is
fundamental also to the Hesychast method of prayer that we shall study in the work of St
Hesychios in Volume III. In fact, we shall see that in this matter, St Hesychios makes explicit
reference to passages of Evagrius. Since we will work with this idea continuously, we can
continue without further discussion.

The next thing that St Macrina says is that these people—the materialists—see only the
elements, but not the their Provenance. We will encounter this again.

We have now reached the argument of the Weaver from the garment.
St Paul writes in this way:

…[B]ecause what can be known concerning God is manifest among them, for
God has manifested [it] to them. Those things which are invisible and
apprehended by thought concerning him from the creation of the world, his
eternal power and Divinity, are seen clearly in those things which have been
made…[1]

This passage of Romans is the God-given argument of the Weaver from the garment for the
existence of God that is the foundation of St Macrina’s own argument. Remember that St
Macrina is responding to the materialistic philosophical programmatic assertion that only
material things exist and that these occurred spontaneously and by chance, without a divine
Providence pervading through things. She has responded by remarking on the blindness of
the materialist to intelligible things and, in particular, to the presence of the Weaver, God, in
the garment, the world. Evagrius will make much of this aspect of God’s presence in his
creation, his presence as the source of the wisdom with which things are made; it is an
important part of his system of contemplation.

St Paul does not argue: he states flatly that God has manifested to all men his eternal power
and Divinity in creation from the beginning of the world. This means that by nature all men
intuitively grasp the presence of God in creation. Let us see how the full quotation from
Romans goes:

For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven upon every impiety and injustice
of men who possess the truth in injustice, because what can be known
concerning God is manifest among them, for God manifested [it] to them. Those
things which are invisible and apprehended by thought concerning him from the
creation of the world, his eternal power and Divinity, are seen clearly in those
things which have been made, so that they are without apology, because
knowing God, they did not glorify [him] or give thanks [to him] as God, but they
were made vain in their reasonings and their heart which had no understanding
was darkened; pretending that they were wise, they were made foolish, and they
changed the glory of the incorruptible God in the similarity of an image of
corruptible man and birds and four-footed creatures and creeping animals.[2]
This argument for the existence of God is God-given, but it has never been accepted by those
who reject the existence of God. In post-Enlightenment Protestant apologetics it has been
used; and it has such a hoary history that even today materialistic controversialists devote
much of their time to devising proofs that it is possible for the wovenness of the garment to
have occurred by a sequence of spontaneous and chance occurrences. What is important to
understand is that the problem is old. The opponents do not accept—vehemently—each
other’s reasonings.

Let us see how St Macrina continues:

For if those who contradict suppose that, since the soul is not of the same
nature with the elements, then, on account of that, the soul is nowhere, let these
men first dogmatize that life in the flesh also is soulless.

What does this mean? The gist of St Macrina’s argument is this: Her opponents say that the
soul cannot exist after the death of the body because if it is of a different nature from the
body then there is nowhere it could be. She says: well, in that case—if the soul cannot exist
after the dissolution of the body because it is of a different nature from the body—then it
neither can exist in the body when the body is alive. Since her opponents accept the existence
of the soul in the living body, this argument obliges them to contradict themselves. St
Macrina will go on to say, in a passage not yet given: well, if you accept that the soul is in the
body while the body is alive, but say that it cannot subsist on its own after the dissolution of
the body because the soul is of a different nature from the body, then by your own logic you
are also obliged also to deny the existence of the Divine Nature, because it is of a similar
nature to the soul in that it is not material. This last her opponents evidently did not want to
do. Let us now see how the argument goes in detail.

St Macrina is saying: Those who say that if the soul is not of the same nature as the body,
then it is nowhere, let them also say that the living body has no soul. As we pointed out
earlier, in common with all the Ancients, St Macrina and St Gregory assume that a living
body has a soul. The question is whether that soul survives death. St Gregory has put forth a
very complicated argument—the materialistic argument—against the survival of the soul that
hinges on the dissolution of the body at death and the implicit dissolution of a soul which
would be of the same material nature as the body (one of the material elements or in the
material elements). He has gone on to say that if the soul is not of the same material nature
as the body, then it must be somewhat complex if it is to be able to connect into all the
disparate parts of the material body and hence not immortal. Or else, he has said, if the soul
is not one of the elements, nor in the elements, and if it is not connected into the body in the
way we have said, then it must be separate from the body—but in that case where would it
be? And that which is nowhere does not exist. While St Gregory appears to have emphasized
the non-survival of the soul in his argument, St Macrina is looking at the matter in a slightly
different light: she is saying that those who say that the soul, if it is of a different nature from
the body, cannot survive the death of the body are also obliged to say that the soul cannot,
for exactly the same reasons, exist in the body while it is alive.

St Macrina has replied to the arguments against the survival by the soul of the death of the
body, first, with an assertion that intelligible things exist in addition to material things,
especially God, and, now, she says, in a patent reductio ad absurdum: Let those who say that
a soul which is not of the same material nature of the body is nowhere after death (and,
hence, non-existent) also say that life in the flesh—in this living body—is also soulless! It is
clear that for St Macrina the idea that a living body has no soul is absurd. Let us recall that
for the Ancient mind the distinction between the living and the dead was irreducible and that
giving an account of ‘soul’ was giving an account of ‘being alive’.

But as we have indicated, the paradigm in modern biology does just what St Macrina thinks
is absurd: it denies the existence of a soul in the living body, reducing to biochemistry
everything that might be construed as ‘being alive’.

Now for St Macrina and for all the Classical Greeks—St Macrina is of the late Classical Age
and sharing as a Christian in its intellectual culture; that is why she is relevant today—one
aspect of the soul is its vivifying character. As we remarked, Aristotle’s definition of the soul
bases itself precisely on that criterion: for Aristotle, the soul is the first actuality, or form, of
an organic body which has the potential of life. We need not enter into Aristotle’s
metaphysics; the important thing is his starting-point: life. In modern biology, as we
remarked, this is called ‘vitalism’. One of the pillars of the modern materialistic synthesis in
science is the rejection of all forms of vitalism in all branches of science, especially biology.
This includes in all the sciences the rejection of a ‘Providence pervading through things’. This
rejection is not methodological but metaphysical. Modern science is resolutely materialistic.

For St Macrina, however, such a position is patently absurd. Hence the ironical force of the
point she is making.

How can we bridge this gulf? Can it be bridged?

No. It is a fundamental clash of philosophical paradigms. St Macrina, however, will later

speak to the idea that the living body has no soul in the following way: she will introduce the
concept of something intelligible (i.e. not material) called mind (Greek: nous), and she and
her brother will discuss what this might be. This will in fact include a discussion of the
mechanistic interpretation of mental behaviour and phenomena, which St Gregory will put
forth as a counter-argument on behalf of the materialist-mechanist, and in a very
sophisticated way.

Let us therefore continue:

For the body is not some sort of thing other than the coming together of the
elements. Let them therefore say that the soul is neither in these elements by
means of itself vivifying the compound, if, indeed, it is not possible after death,
as they suppose, that the soul also exists, given that the elements exist—that is
to say, as being nothing else but a proof by them that our life is death.

This very difficult passage is important. First, let us look at St Macrina’s plain meaning. The
sense of her argument is this: If those who contradict the survival of the soul after death say
that the reason is that the soul is of a different nature from the elements and cannot subsist
by itself after death without those elements, then let them also admit that the soul, for the
same reason, cannot subsist in the body while the body is still alive. Implicit in what St
Macrina is saying is this question: why should the soul, if it is of a different nature from the
body and cannot exist on its own when the body disintegrates after death, be able to exist in
the body before death? She says that the body is nothing other than the conjunction of
material elements. She then says: Let those who say—evidently the Epicureans, who held
that the soul dissipated after death—that it is not possible for the soul to continue to exist
after the death of the body although the elements which make up the body continue to exist—
let those say, then, that the soul is neither in the body while the body is alive, by means of
itself vivifying the compound. The sense is that whatever would prevent the soul from
existing after death, the fact that it is something different from the elements of the body,
would also prevent it from existing in the body while the body is still alive. The force of St
Macrina’s reductio ad absurdum is that a body composed of material elements without
something to vivify it would simply be dead. Recall the passage of Genesis: ‘And God made
man, dust from the earth, and blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto a
living soul.’[3] Without the breath of life to vivify the compound, man would remain dust:
dead. This is St Macrina’s sense in the remainder of the passage: Let those who deny the
continuance of the soul after death also deny its vivifying presence in the body while the body
is alive, so that they will be seen to have proved that our life is death.

As we have already pointed out, this is precisely the position of the materialistic biologist
today. What was deemed to be life, or the presence of a vivifying soul, is shown, on his
account, merely to be biochemistry.

One part of this passage is extremely important, the part we emphasized with italics in our
paraphrase: ‘by means of itself vivifying the compound’. The underlying Greek word for
‘vivifying’ is the same word, with a slight change for the grammar, used of the Holy Spirit in
the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. This creed is the creed known today in the Orthodox
Church simply as the Nicene Creed and recited in the Divine Liturgy, among other places in
the daily services, as a formal profession of faith. The original Nicene Creed was extended by
the Second Ecumenical Synod in 381 at Constantinople to make clear the dogma of the Holy
Spirit. In its present form, the Nicene Creed says of the Holy Spirit: ‘The Giver of Life’. The
underlying Greek word is the one that above we have translated ‘vivifying’, and ‘The Giver of
Life’ could well be translated ‘The Vivifier’. The person said to have been responsible for
drafting the changes to the Nicene Creed at the Second Ecumenical Synod is none other than
St Gregory of Nyssa, the author of our dialogue and St Macrina’s interlocutor. Hence we can
conclude that the concept of the soul’s vivifying the body by means of itself is parallel to the
concept of the Holy Spirit’s giving life to all of creation. In other words, it is inconceivable to
St Gregory of Nyssa, and to his sister, St Macrina, that a body would be alive without the
presence of a vivifying force. That the body is composed of elements they freely concede.
That the elements work by means of natural laws would prove no obstacle. Aristotle said the
same thing. That the body could be alive without a vivifying soul they reject. Again we
encounter this conflict with the paradigm of biology of the materialistic and mechanistic
school.

Let us look at how the soul might vivify the body, given the scientific data uncovered today in
the laboratory. In his Mystagogia (Mystagogy), St Maximos the Confessor refers to the
operation (energeia) of God which keeps in existence all existent things, since otherwise they
would disintegrate on account of the natural tendency of dissimilar elements to fly apart
from each other.[4] This operation (energeia) does not substitute for natural laws, but
permits them to operate. One might even say that it creates those natural laws. By the
analogy that we have just established, then, the soul does the same thing: it permits the laws
of chemistry to maintain the body in existence.

Let us continue:

If they do not doubt that the soul is now in the body,

As we have said, for the Ancients, a body without a soul was dead. A discussion of ‘persons’
who were mere concourses of chemical reactions would be preposterous to them. Hence,
even St Macrina’s opponents, evidently the Epicureans, wished to retain the belief that the
living body was vivified by a soul.

how do they dogmatize the vanishing of the soul when the body dissolves into
its elements? Then let them also dare to do the same against the very Divine
Nature. For how do they say that the mental (noera) and immaterial and
formless nature penetrating into the damp and soft and warm and dry holds
together existent things in being, since they have it neither related to those
things into which it penetrates, nor unable to penetrate because of its different
nature? Therefore let them remove the Divine completely from their dogma—
the Divine by which existent things are held firmly in existence.
We have already mentioned that St Maximos the Confessor makes use in his Mystagogy of
this idea of the operation (energeia) of God which holds existent things in being.

Let us now turn to what St Macrina is saying. She has said that a soul different in nature than
the elements, if it could not exist on its own after the dissolution of the body, also could not
exist in the body before the dissolution of the body. She has said that the opponents of the
survival after death of a soul different in nature from the body are therefore obliged to admit
that the living body has no soul, something she treats as a reductio ad absurdum. She now
says: But if our opponents do not accept that the living body has no soul, how can they assert
that the soul vanishes upon death? If they accept that position, then they are similarly
obliged to deny the existence of the Divine Nature. For they say that the mental[5] and
immaterial and formless nature (this is clearly the Divine Nature) penetrates into the
material elements (this is the significance of the qualities listed: ‘damp and soft and warm
and dry’) and thereby firmly holds existent things in existence—as we said, the presumption
is that the disparate and opposing qualities of the elements would cause them to fly apart
without such a containing and maintaining power. But our opponents neither assert that the
Divine Nature is related to the material elements nor do they deny that it is able to penetrate
into the material elements. The sense is this: if the soul cannot exist on its own after the
dissolution of the body because it is of a different nature from the body, then, given that the
soul is of a similar nature to the Divine Nature, how can our opponents not also reject the
possibility of the existence of the ‘mental and immaterial and formless’ Divine Nature, given
that the Divine Nature, as our opponents themselves concede, neither is related ontologically
to the material world nor is unable to penetrate into that material world so as to uphold it in
the way we just have said?

A modern materialistic and mechanistic biologist would say: ‘Well, you’re quite right. No
soul. No God. Chemical systems.’ Discussions of ‘person’ in the context of biology and
medicine today have that concept of ‘person’ defined in this context. It will be extremely
difficult for an Orthodox Christian to communicate with a modern materialistic and
mechanistic biologist unless he have a clear understanding of the ontology underlying
modern biology and medicine. It is in the context of an ontology manifestly absurd according
to St Gregory’s presentation, that the concept of ‘person’ is defined in modern biology and
medicine.
[5] Noera—this important word can also be translated ‘spiritual’; etymologically it means ‘possessing mind’.

Chapter I -- 11

Let us continue. For reasons evidently known to him, St Gregory changes the subject:

This very thing, I said, how might it become undoubted to those who speak in
opposition, that all things are from God and that all things are maintained by
him, or even, in short, that there exists something Divine lying over the nature
of existent things?

She said: In regard to such persons, it would be more appropriate to keep

silence and not to deem the foolish and impious propositions worthy of an
answer, since one of the Holy Scriptures forbids [it, commanding us] not to
answer a fool in his folly. And, at all events, the fool, according to the Prophet,
is he who says that God is not. Since, however, it is necessary to say this too, I
am going to tell you a word, not mine, neither that of some other man—for such
a word would be small as much as it would be—but the very word that the
creation of things which exist relates in detail by means of the wonders which
are in it, of which the audience becomes the eye, the wise and skilful word
reverberating in the heart by means of those things which appear.

The creation cries out openly the Maker, the very Heavens, according to the
Prophet, in unutterable voices narrating the glory of God. Who, seeing the
harmony of all things, of the Heavenly and terrestrial wonders, how the
elements, being opposed to each other according to their natures, are woven
together towards exactly the same goal by some unspeakable communion, each
element contributing the power which is found in it to the continuance of the
whole; and neither do the elements which are unmixed and uncommuning
according to the property of their qualities depart from each other; neither are
they destroyed in each other, being mixed with each other in the opposed
qualities; but even those elements whose nature it is to rise up are brought
down, the heat of the sun flowing down through the rays and the heavy bodies
are made light, being made fine by means of the vapours, as also water despite
its own nature becomes light, being carried through the air by the winds; and
the ethereal fire comes down to the earth, so that the deep is not without
participation in its warmth; the moisture being poured out on the earth from
the rains, being one in nature, engenders countless varieties of vegetation,
being implanted appropriately in every way in the substratum; the most quick
rotation of the Pole and the backwards movement within the Circles, the
runnings under and the conjunctions and the harmonious distances of the stars
—he who sees these things with the intellectual eye of the soul: is he not
manifestly taught from those things which are seen that a Divine Power artful
and wise, appearing in those things which exist and penetrating through all
things, both harmonizes the parts to the whole and completes the whole in the
parts, and with a certain single power the whole is maintained, that whole
remaining in itself and moving round itself and neither having an end of its
motion, neither being displaced to another place besides the one in which it is?

We have left this very fine expression of faith in the providential presence of God in his
creation untouched. Let us now make some comments.

As should be clear, this statement is a return by St Macrina to her earlier statement that one
can recognize the Weaver from the garment, a statement that we identified with St Paul’s
passage in Romans:

…[B]ecause what can be known concerning God is manifest among them, for
God has manifested [it] to them. Those things which are invisible and
apprehended by thought concerning him from the creation of the world, his
eternal power and Divinity, are seen clearly in those things which have been
made…[1]

This argument for the existence of God is not a rationalistic propositional argument of the
sort that philosophers have come to expect in philosophy. It is, in modern philosophical
language, an intuitionist argument. St Macrina is clear: ‘the wise and skilful word
reverberating in the heart by means of those things which appear’. This ‘word’ we will learn
from Evagrius to be the wisdom of God, the main mode of his presence in creation; and we
will learn to contemplate the ‘words (logoi)’ which in the wisdom of God are the essences of
created things, the things which have come to be.

St Paul says ‘those things invisible and apprehended by thought’, namely ‘his eternal power
and Divinity’. First let us look at ‘those things invisible and apprehended by thought’. The
Revised Standard Version (RSV), a standard Protestant translation, has:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever
since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.[2]

What interests us is the fate in the RSV of the words that we have translated ‘those things
invisible and apprehended by thought’. On the one hand, the plural word we have translated
‘invisible things’ has become the singular, ‘invisible nature’. On the other hand, the word, a
participle (again a plural), we have translated ‘apprehended by thought’, seems to have
disappeared. In fact, it seems to have been assimilated into the verb we have translated ‘are
seen clearly’, so that that verb has become ‘has been clearly perceived’, singular to
accommodate the change from ‘invisible things’ to ‘invisible nature’.

Why are we saying these things? The RSV translation marks a shift of perspective that
obscures the point that St Macrina is making: ‘those things invisible and apprehended by
thought concerning him’ are not sensibly perceived but intelligibly apprehended. Moreover,
an even more subtle analysis would question the substitution of ‘those things invisible and
apprehended by thought concerning him’ by ‘his invisible nature’. For as is well known to
every Orthodox Christian, the nature of God cannot be apprehended, only his operations
(energeies); in the present context it might be better to say, his properties or attributes. For
it is clear that St Paul means ‘those things invisible and apprehended by thought concerning
him from the creation of the world’ to be precisely ‘his eternal power and Divinity’. God’s
eternal power is not his nature but a property or attribute of his nature. The same is true, as
odd as it might seem to say it, of his Divinity.

We therefore have two aspects of this argument for the existence of God which must interest
us greatly for our development of the psychology of mental prayer in the heart: this
argument for the existence of God is on the one hand intuitionist; on the other hand, it
depends on apprehending intelligibly, not sensibly, the presence of God in his creation. The
psychology of contemplation in the practice of mental prayer in the heart depends on this
twofold aspect. For contemplation itself will be found to be intuitionist and dependent on
intelligible rather than sensible apprehension of the object of contemplation, one object of
which is the presence of God in his creation as the wisdom that is the form of that creation.
Now this intelligible apprehension is not a matter of propositional reasoning, since it is
intuitionist; it is a matter of an intelligible intuition, by means of a mental or spiritual faculty
or sense.

We are well aware that at this time this might be incomprehensible to our reader. We hope
that by the end of Volume III our reader will have an expert knowledge of the matter.

We might also say that when this intuitionist argument is transformed into a method of
contemplation, then what we have called an ‘intuitionist’ argument will become an
‘experimental’ argument: one encounters God in his wisdom in contemplation by proceeding
experimentally in faith—with the proper prior preparation and with the grace of God.

Let us now turn to St Macrina’s description of the actual weaving of the elements. St Macrina
emphasizes, first, the contrast between the harmony of the result and the intrinsically
opposed qualities of the elements. As we have already remarked, St Macrina is using the
chemistry and physics of her day, which comprised four elements that were considered to
have contrary qualities. That is not so far from a modern understanding of chemistry and
physics: it is well-known that when some elementary particles collide they are each
annihilated with the release of a quantity of radiation; that other elementary particles, for
example those with the same electrical charge, cannot easily approach each other. What St
Macrina says is that each element contributes its particular properties to the whole—to the
one goal—despite its different and opposing qualities, and that without departing from the
other, opposed elements or being annihilated. What effects this is precisely the divine power
which upholds creation: we saw this already in brief in St Maximos the Confessor. Moreover,
under the constraint of the divine power, the elements sometimes act contrary to their
nature, as when the heat of the sun descends and makes heavy things to ascend. Here it must
be remarked that the doctrine of the natural tendency of some elements to rise (such as the
heat of the sun) and of other elements to sink down (such as earth) is found in Aristotle’s
Physics,[3] as is the doctrine that things generally have a natural motion which they follow
unless they are constrained. Hence, St Macrina is making use of Aristotle here. However, we
do not think that the doctrine that the divine power constrains the elements in the weaving
of creation can be traced to Aristotle: his very famous doctrine of the unmoved mover places
God outside the cosmos: the unmoved mover moves only the first-moved mover, which itself
moves with a rotational movement and which, itself moving, commences the chain of motion
in the cosmos. St Macrina’s doctrine is quite different and we do not know where to assign it.
It may, indeed, be a particularly Christian doctrine, this immediate intervention of God
through his divine power in creation to uphold the interweaving into a harmonious whole of
elements opposed in their qualities.

As we remarked earlier, this immediate intervention of God through his divine power to
uphold the interweaving of the elements with their opposed qualities does not abrogate
natural law, but allows it to operate—we might even say that it founds natural law.

The ‘ethereal fire’ seems to refer to the fifth element that Aristotle posited, that which was to
be found only in the heavens among the stars. It is not clear to us whether St Macrina means
the heat of the sun as a particular instance of this ethereal fire, or whether she has a broader
idea of the descent of the ethereal fire to warm the bowels of the earth.

Something that may not be immediately apparent is that St Macrina emphasizes the oneness
of the nature of the moisture that engenders the countless varieties of vegetation when that
moisture penetrates into the substratum, the soil. A modern scientist might similarly marvel
at the countless varieties of life forms that are produced from four nucleotides on the DNA
and from a genetic code that comprises instructions for a quite limited number of amino
acids. We might go even further: the absolute intricacy of the chemical mechanisms in the
nucleus of the living cell for the molecular genetics of life is utterly astonishing.

St Macrina then turns to astronomy. Aristotle, again, has a discussion in the Physics of the
rotation of the heavens round the Pole; he even has a discussion of which Pole is up, the
North or the South. Even today, when in astronomy the dominant model of St Macrina’s
time has been superseded, who is not astonished when he sees telescope photographs of
constellations resolved into galaxies and clusters of galaxies, with counts of stars and
distances which exceed the human imagination? Who, today, proceeding further into
theoretical discussions of the forces holding together the galaxies—

with the intellectual eye of the soul, is … not manifestly taught from those things
which are seen that a Divine Power artful and wise, appearing in those things
which exist and penetrating through all things, both harmonizes the parts to the
whole and completes the whole in the parts, and with a certain single power the
whole is maintained, that whole remaining in itself and moving round itself and
neither having an end of its motion, neither being displaced to another place
besides the one in which it is?

The last part of this quotation seems also to derive from Aristotle’s Physics; it is reminiscent
of Aristotle’s description of the first-moved mover, although, here, St Macrina is applying the
description to the whole universe.

The Nineteenth Century translator of On the Soul and the Resurrection, Moore, has ‘eclipses
and conjunctions and measured intervals of the planets’,[4] although our text refers to
‘stars’.[5] These indeed might be technical terms in Classical astronomy, but we ourselves
rather see here Aristotle’s description, in his presentation of astronomy in the Physics, of the
Spheres, some of which Spheres according to him indeed have a retrograde motion—
precisely those of the planets.

Certainly the details of astronomy have been refined through the observation and reflection
of men over the years. But: ‘The Heavens narrate the glory of God and the firmament
proclaims the work of his hands.’[6]

We have emphasized here, in our commentary on this passage of St Macrina, on the one
hand the astonishment at both the intricacy and the grandeur of creation that the
contemplation[7] of creation engenders in the person and, on the other hand, the entering
into theoretical discussions[8] of the forces holding together the universe. It should be
understood, however, that the intelligible intuition of the wisdom of God is neither raw
astonishment, although that may be the beginning or even the result of contemplation in the
mystical sense, nor scientific model-building, although that also might be a beginning of the
raising of the mind to spiritual contemplation. The intelligible intuition is sui generis.

What is the ‘intellectual eye of the soul’ to which St Macrina is referring? It is the mind or
nous. We will encounter two terms, translated ‘mind’ and ‘intellect’: nous and dianoia. We
will discuss at length what these terms refer to. But let us at least point out at this time that
what is seen by the ‘intellectual eye of the soul’ is not something sensible but something
intelligible.

This whole piece, as we have indicated, bears the stamp of Aristotle. Aristotle himself was a
religious man even if a pagan—something that is usually ignored—and it is clear that the
cosmology that he defines in the Physics[9] and in On Generation and Corruption[10] is at
least in part dictated by his own religious convictions. The one aspect, as we have pointed
out, that we do not know to be from Aristotle is the notion—repeated by St Maximos the
Confessor in his Mystagogia—that the elements would naturally fly apart from each other or
even annihilate each other, and the compounds disintegrate, without a divine power which
held them together against their nature. We have already remarked on the analogous role
that could be granted to the soul in regard to the living body: in the living body, the soul
would constrain the elements to remain together, thus making possible the biochemistry of
the body.

Is this valid today, this idea of St Macrina of a divine power upholding all creation?

While particle physics can hardly be considered to be a finished business, one is struck by the
order and regularity postulated to exist and by the powers concealed in the elementary
particles. It takes a certain amount of labour to release those powers. Once released,
however, they are uncontrollable. Hence, the notion of a divine power harmoniously keeping
the elementary particles in their places is not on the face of it absurd.

Certainly the geocentric universe is gone in physics. In religion, however, we remain centred
on the earth.
But perhaps the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is the materialistic reply
to St Macrina?

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) devised the Copenhagen
Interpretation partly on the basis of the interpretation by Max Born (1882–1970), a resolute
atheist, of the Schrödinger (1887–1961) wave functions as probability functions.[11] This
interpretation of the wave functions produces a probabilistic universe. Such a probabilistic
universe does not foresee a divine power upholding all creation. Such a universe has a
completely different ontology.

Is the Copenhagen Interpretation valid? The wave functions work. Their interpretation,
however, is a matter of just that—interpretation. And here we have a fundamental problem:
we design a mathematical formalism that gives a good fit to observations over a certain
range; and either we interpret that mathematical formalism in a certain fashion, or, in the
first place, we were motivated by a certain understanding of nature to construct the
formalism in the way that we did.[12] But what we find is that the formalism is not always
valid over all possible ranges of observations; and that another formalism, with a different
interpretation, is valid where the first formalism is not. Moreover, the two formalisms may
not agree over their common domains. This is well known to be the case with Newtonian
mechanics and the special theory of relativity. The second is not a mathematical extension of
the first, nor are the interpretations or motivations of the two consistent, nor do the two give
the same answers.[13]

This makes basing your faith on man-made theories a chancy affair. Sometimes you’re right;
sometimes you’re not.

We wonder, in 500 years will the Copenhagen Interpretation be remembered? Or will

another mathematical formalism replace quantum mechanics, to be accompanied by another
man-made interpretation and understanding of nature? We do not doubt that the wave
functions that led to the invention of, say, the tunnel microscope were quantum-mechanical.
But it is the mathematical formalism, not the interpretation, which provides the functions.
Indeed, in their daily work, most working physicists do not occupy themselves with
questions of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. They do not need to. However, there
certainly remain open philosophical questions in quantum mechanics concerning the
interpretation of the mathematical formalism.

We wonder, then, whether any of these theories has an absolute character such that it cannot
be displaced by another theory tomorrow, together with its different interpretation or
philosophy of nature.

Moreover, the two great theories of Twentieth Century physics, the general theory of
relativity and quantum mechanics, do not have consistent philosophies of nature and have
not yet been integrated the one into the other even at the level of the mathematical
formalism. That is why the deviser of the first theory, Albert Einstein, to his dying day never
accepted the validity of the second theory, quantum mechanics, or of the Copenhagen
Interpretation.

The notion that the moisture, being one, is implanted in the substratum appropriately in
every way deserves further comment. We will see in Volume II, when we discuss Evagrius’
Treatise on the Practical Life, a reference by Evagrius to Didymus the Blind where Didymus
(c.313–c.399) says much the same thing about virtue: that the nature of virtue is one but that
it expresses itself differently in different parts of the soul. Hence, we might take St Macrina’s
remark to be a hint of a doctrine of Grace: that it is one, and that it implants itself in every
way appropriately in those substrata (whether human or animate or inanimate) in which it
takes its abode. Moreover, we find in Chapters 108 and 109 of On Those Who Think They are
Justified by Works by St Mark the Ascetic (2nd half of 4th C.–p.431) an explicit doctrine that
the grace of the Holy Spirit is one and that it operates in each person in accordance with his
virtues and his need, just as the rain falling on the earth provides the quality appropriate to
each plant.[14] The similarity to our text is so striking that we wonder whether St Mark the
Ascetic had read St Gregory of Nyssa, or whether this was just a common simile of the epoch.

In general, the divine Power, artful and wise, which penetrates all things and which
harmonizes the parts to the whole and completes the whole in its parts, is none other than
the Holy Spirit.
How valid is this intuitionist argument for the existence of God? For that is what St Gregory
has requested of his sister, an argument for the existence of God. This argument from the
garment of creation to the Weaver has never been refuted. It cannot be. It is God’s self-
revelation to each person in his soul. It is the very stamp of being created by God. For that
reason, we feel one with nature and not different. God speaks in the soul of each of his
creatures: ‘I have created you.’ Even the animals know; even the plants; even the rocks; even
the stars. God himself has spoken and speaks.

[7] In the common acceptation.

[8] In the scientific model-building sense.

[11] The Schrödinger wave functions (or, equations) describe the world-line (path) of a particle such as an electron. They
are at the very heart of quantum mechanics.

[12] There is in fact a very complex process of interaction between formalism and interpretation in the development of
any physical theory.

[13] The answers are close when the velocity of the object being considered is low with respect to the frame of reference
of the observer.

[14] Mark Volume I, pp. 160–2.

Chapter I -- 12

Gregory now continues:

And how, I said, can the faith that God exists and that the human soul exists be
demonstrated together

It is an interesting point, that faith in God and the human soul should be demonstrated
together, one that shows the fundamental futility of Orthodox bioethics. For to those who
refuse God, how will we prove the existence of a human soul in the embryo? And those who
accept that soul’s existence—do they not also believe in God?

(for truly the soul is not identical to God)

Here we see an explicit rejection of pantheism by St Gregory.

so that if the one should be confessed to exist, then at all events the remaining
one should be confessed together [with it to exist]?

She said: It is said by the wise that man is a certain small world containing in
himself the same elements with which the universe is filled. If, then, this word
is true, it would seem, perhaps, that we would have no need of another alliance
so that there should be established in us that which we understood concerning
the soul. We understood, then, the soul in itself to be in an unusual nature
peculiar to itself separate from the grossness of the body. For as, wholly
discovering the world by sense-perception, we are led, by means of this very
operation according to our senses, to the conception (ennoia), which is above
sense, of object (pragma) and thought (noema); and the eye becomes for us the
interpreter of the omnipotent wisdom which, on the one hand, is viewed in the
universe and which, on the other hand, declares by means of itself him who has
grasped the universe by means of it—thus, looking towards the world which is
in us, we do not have small starting-points to find, by means of those things
which appear, that which is hidden. For that has been hidden, what in itself is
intelligible and formless, and it escapes sensible comprehension.

St Macrina is making several points here. First, she is drawing a parallel between the
presence of the soul in the living body and the presence of God in the world. This is the
significance of treating man as a microcosm. She then goes on to give a preliminary
definition of the soul. Although she uses the past tense—‘We understood’—this is the first
time she or St Gregory has explicitly given a definition. This definition is important, although
it will be refined later. It makes of the soul a substance ‘separate from the grossness of the
body’—and hence not material—having an unusual nature peculiar to itself. The soul is not
the brain or the functioning of a part of the body; it is not the DNA or the information
content of the DNA; it is not an electromagnetic field or electromagnetic radiation; it is not of
the same nature with God. It is something immaterial—intelligible—with a nature peculiar to
itself. St Macrina will later elaborate at great length on this nature.

St Macrina then makes use of the intuitionist argument for the existence of God that she has
just given to clarify how we can come to know the soul that is of this unusual nature. She
says, first, that we can discover the world only by sense-perception. In this she agrees with
Hume. However, she goes on to say: ‘For as, wholly discovering the world by sense-
perception, we are led, by means of this very operation according to our senses, to the
conception (ennoia), which is above sense, of object (pragma) and thought (noema).’ To
paraphrase: We discover the world only by sense-perception. However, we are led, by means
of this very operation of sense-perception, to the conception (ennoia) which is above sense-
perception—the intelligible conception (ennoia)—which intelligible conception (ennoia)
pertains to objects (pragmata) or to thoughts (noemata). That is, we can be led from sense-
perception, our sole means of knowing the sensible world, to an intelligible conception
(ennoia) which might pertain either to an object (pragma) or to a thought (noema). Here, St
Macrina has departed from Hume, for this intelligible conception (ennoia) is not by any
means arrived at by the association of the mental images of sense-perceptions, passions or
emotions. Hume as it were knew it; that is why there is such a great insistence in his
philosophy on the formation of concepts only from sense-perceptions and so on, and only by
the association of mental images of sense-perceptions and so on: Hume and his school are
attacking the existence of intelligible things, including mind (nous) and intelligible
conceptions (ennoies) of the sort that St Macrina is discussing. This difference is quite
important for the reader to grasp.

St Macrina then goes on to say that just as we see the omnipotent wisdom which is viewed in
the universe and which declares by means of itself him who holds the whole universe in his
hand by means of that omnipotent wisdom, so, in the same way, looking at the microcosm
that we are, we can find, by means of those things that appear to us by means of our sense-
perception of the living person, that which is hidden, the soul. For the soul has been hidden
since it is intelligible and formless and therefore escapes sense-perception. This is the use of
the intuitionist argument for the existence of God as a model for an intuitionist argument for
the existence of the soul. This argument hinges on our being led by intuitive induction from
the things we perceive about a living person to a conception (ennoia) of his soul, which
conception (ennoia) is intelligible and not the product of the association of mental images of
sense-perceptions and so on.

Now St Macrina says that the conception (ennoia) is of object (pragma) and thought
(noema). It is not clear precisely what she means. She means, it appears, that we can have
conceptions (ennoies), which are above sense-perception and to which we are led by sense-
perception, which conceptions (ennoies) can refer either to a sensible object (pragma) or to
a thought (noema).

We will see in Evagrius an idea, taken from the Stoics or the Neoplatonists, of the reason
(logos) of a created object, what we might call, in its highest form, the object’s essence, or
raison d’être, in the wisdom of God. This reason (logos) is on the one hand intelligible in
quite the way we are discussing; on the other hand it pertains to a sensible object. Of course,
a conception (ennoia) which referred to a thought (noema) would necessarily be intelligible,
since a thought (noema), despite Hume, is intelligible. St Gregory himself will just below use
much the same language of the reasons (logoi) of existent things, the contemplation of which
reasons (logoi) of existent things allows us, according to him, to infer the Wisdom which lies
over all.

Now, St Macrina’s point is this: By means of this being led from sense-perception to the
intelligible conception (ennoia), we were led, just above, in her argument of the Weaver from
the garment of creation, to the intelligible conception (ennoia) of the omnipotent wisdom,
‘that which is viewed in the universe and which declares by means of itself him who has
grasped the universe by means of it.’ In other words, she is explaining that her description
just above of the material creation led us to the intelligible conception (ennoia) of the
omnipotent wisdom by means of which God has woven the elements together despite their
contrary qualities into a harmonious whole with a single goal; and, from that omnipotent
wisdom, to God himself. Now what she wants to do is to use the idea that man is a
microcosm—that is, an analogy of the universe—to lead us from our sense-perception of the
living person—let us say, of the living person’s behaviour—to an intelligible conception
(ennoia) of that which is behind the person’s behaviour,[1] namely the soul. For since the
soul is intelligible, it ‘has been hidden, what in itself is intelligible and formless, and it
escapes sensible comprehension.’ This conception of the soul is Platonic but not completely
so. St Macrina will later, in fact, refer to Plato indirectly, but only—rhetorically—to dismiss
him, and her final analysis will include elements of Aristotle. She is in fact eclectic. However,
in Western philosophy, the doctrine that the soul is an intelligible substance of the sort that
St Macrina is describing is associated chiefly with Plato.

This doctrine is very important for St Macrina’s, St Gregory’s and subsequent Christianity’s
understanding of the soul.

St Macrina, to recapitulate, is saying that if some wise men have said that man is a
microcosm—the universe writ small—then just as we discover the existence of God by the
wisdom present in creation, which wisdom declares the existence of the unseen Creator, so in
the same way we can also discover the existence of the unseen soul by its own operations
(energeies)[2] in the living person. For just as God is inapprehensible by the senses, so the
soul is similarly hidden and inapprehensible by the senses.

Let us look again at a very important point. St Macrina says that we are led from sense-
perception, our sole means of apprehending the world of sense, to a conception (ennoia),
which is above sense, of an object (pragma) or thought (noema). We have already remarked
that this process of induction is intuitive and not due to an association of mental images of
sense-perceptions and so on. This intelligible conception (ennoia), at least at this stage, does
not seem to be intended by St Macrina to be a Platonic form. So far, all that seems to be
implied about these intelligible conceptions (ennoies) is that they are above sense. The
notion, however, that one is led intuitively to the apprehension of an intelligible conception
(ennoia) which is above sense has something in common with Plato and with Plotinus (205–
270).

For Aristotle, only material substances exist, even though they instantiate intelligibles which
have an objective existence: although, according to Aristotle, there is no such thing as the
form of man, and only individual men exist (as against the supposed form of man), that men
are men is objectively true: that intelligible thing that we call the species of man exists
objectively, although not substantially in the same way that individual men exist, but in a
secondary sense only; and that objectively existent species of man is instantiated in
individual men.
Hume, of course, and along with him all those who stand in his tradition, reject the
autonomous existence of the conception (ennoia) which is above sense-perception, even in
the Aristotelian sense just explained. Hume’s theory of cognition grounds all conceptions
(ennoies) firmly on sense-perceptions, passions and emotions, with no possibility within his
philosophy of the autonomous existence of conceptions (ennoies) to which we are led by
sense-perception but which are not sense-perceptions and so on, nor due to the associations
of mental images of sense-perceptions and so on, nor even things strictly and directly
dependent on the association of sense-perceptions and so on, nor even concatenations of
independent ideas that are each a mental image of a disparate sense-perception, passion or
emotion—but something autonomous.

The more philosophically minded Hesychast must grasp the significance of intelligible
conceptions (ennoies). For the program that he will undertake is precisely to divest himself
of conceptions (ennoies) or thoughts[3] based on sense-perception so as to enter into the
intelligible world of intelligible conceptions (ennoies) which are above sense-perception and
which pertain in some fashion to God, and to proceed through that world to God himself.
Even the unimpassioned conceptions (ennoies) the Hesychast has of sensible objects will
impede him. However, both the intelligible conceptions (ennoies) pertaining in some fashion
to God, and God himself, are apprehended intuitively in prayer or contemplation: it is not a
matter of propositional logic. This is at the heart of the Evagrian ascetical program that we
will discuss in Volume II.

Barlaam (c.1290–1348?), the major opponent of Fourteenth Century Hesychasm, in his

polemic as it is presented in Huper ton Hieros Hesuchazonton (In Defence of Those Keeping
Stillness in a Holy Manner) by St Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)[4] at first sight has a
somewhat similar program: through the intellectual sciences (in the mediæval Western
speculative, propositional sense) to grasp truth. In Barlaam’s hands, this does seem to be a
classically Scholastic educational program. The fundamental difference between Barlaam’s
system and Hesychasm, it seems to us, is Barlaam’s refusal to see that knowledge of God is
not propositional (intellectual) but intuitive (mystical), and that the program of ascent must
be conceived of as a purification of the soul so that the eye of the soul (the mind or nous) can
by grace intuitively apprehend the God who is One, and by a principle of ontological
identification become united to God through this intuitive apprehension of God.[5] Barlaam
insisted on the importance of a program of intellectual studies which led to the accumulation
of ‘higher’ conceptions (ennoies) of a propositional nature (i.e. propositions of a more
general metaphysical and theological import), according to the model of the curricula
current in the Western universities in Barlaam’s day, the High Middle Ages.

So we have here at the base of Christianity a certain understanding: the soul is something
intelligible.

[1] We are using modern language here.

[2] St Macrina surely does not use this word here.

[3] Here, in the common acceptation.

[4] Palamas.

[5] This intuitive apprehension of God is experienced as light. This light is a central aspect, already in the Eighth
Century, of the Hesychasm of St Hesychios which forms the subject of Volume III.

Chapter I -- 13

Let us continue. St Gregory is speaking:

And I said, it is possible to infer by means of the wise and skilful reasons (logoi)
which are contemplated in the nature of existent things, in this very
harmonious adornment, the Wisdom which lies over all. How, however, might
the gnosis of the soul come to occur to those who trace the steps of the hidden
from those things which appear, by means of those things which are shown by
the body?

We have left untranslated ‘gnosis’. The meaning of this word, of course, is ‘knowledge’. We
felt, however, because there is an English word, ‘gnosis’, and because what is involved is not
propositional but intuitive knowledge, that it was well to leave the word as is. Moreover, we
shall find in Volume II that in Evagrius’ system, the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of
existent things leads to a partial intuitive knowledge—gnosis—of the wisdom of God.

And the virgin said: Most certainly the soul itself is an adequate teacher of
notions concerning the soul for those who desire according to that wise
commandment to know themselves: that it is something immaterial and
bodiless, operating appropriately in its own nature and setting itself in motion
and by means of the bodily organs manifesting its own movements. For the very
instrumental (organike) apparatus of the body is nothing less even in the case
of those bodies which have been made insensible through death, but the body
remains motionless and without operation when the power of the soul is not
present in it. The body is set in motion at the time that sense is in the organs
and insofar as the intelligible (noete) power by means of the sense pervades it,
the intelligible (noete) power setting in motion with its own impulsions the
instrumental (organika) faculties of sense towards that which seems (good to
it).

Let us take this definition apart.

St Macrina says that the soul—your soul—will teach you what it itself is.

The soul is ‘immaterial’: It is not sensible.

The soul is ‘bodiless’: This is an adjective that is applied to the angelic powers, and indicates
man’s relatedness to the angels. Our soul is related to the angels in a way which will become
clear as we proceed. The plain meaning, of course, is that the soul is not the body or a part of
the body, nor does it have its own sensible body perceivable by the senses. A bodiless power
such as the soul cannot be perceived by the senses. Neither can an angel.

The soul operates ‘appropriately in its own nature’: This means that the soul has its own
‘rules’, its own laws of operation. These are not the laws of the world of objects of sense. For
example, photographing the soul would be impossible. The soul itself is not subject to the
laws of chemistry or physics or biology. It is subject to spiritual laws.

‘Setting itself in motion’: The soul sets itself in motion. In accordance with Platonic doctrine,
St Macrina has the soul able to initiate its own movement. This corresponds to our notion of
free will and to our experience that we are able to decide to do something and to do it. The
word that St Gregory, the author, uses is somewhat ambiguous and might also be interpreted
‘being set in motion’. We have translated according to sense, given St Gregory’s known
Platonizing tendencies.

The soul manifests its own motions by means of the bodily organs: This is very important.
We cannot see the soul, since it is immaterial and bodiless. Moreover, the soul is a self-
mover: when I move my hand my soul has itself initiated the movement and nothing has put
my soul into motion. But we do not see the motion of my soul; we see the movement of my
hand. This movement of my hand manifests the motion of my soul, which itself has not been
put into motion by another agent. Moreover, the speech of a man manifests the movements
of his mind (nous). This analysis of human action should be borne in mind when in Chapter
IV we look at the doctrine of the person in St Thomas Aquinas.

‘For the very instrumental (organike) apparatus of the body is nothing less even in the case
of those bodies which have been made insensible through death, but the body remains
motionless and without operation when the power of the soul is not present in it.’: St
Macrina is referring to the state of the body when a person has died: the body is motionless
and without operation.[1] When the power of the soul is not present in it, the living body is
exactly the same as a dead body. That is, it is only the presence of the soul which gives life
(‘motion and operation’) to the body of the living person. If we remove the soul, then the
body is motionless and without operation, just as it is in the case of a cadaver. It is the soul
that gives life to the body. It is well to recall here the rejection, as a matter of paradigm, of
the vivifying role of the soul by the school of materialistic and mechanistic biologists
represented by Watson and his fellow authors of Molecular Biology of the Gene. As we have
pointed out, the vivifying activity of the soul does not displace the laws of chemistry, but
enables them to operate, just as that Divine Power which upholds the universe, the Holy
Spirit, does not displace the laws of nature, but allows them to operate or even founds them.
‘Instrumental (organike) apparatus of the body’ here means that the soul uses the body just
as a person would use a tool. This is a Platonic conception.

‘The body is set in motion at the time that sense is in the organs and insofar as the intelligible
(noete) power by means of the sense pervades it, the intelligible (noete) power setting in
motion with its own impulsions the instrumental (organika) faculties of sense towards that
which seems (good to it).’: This is a little difficult. The first part of this sentence refers to the
cases where a person is sleeping or unconscious. When a person is asleep or unconscious, his
senses are not in his organs. Here ‘organs’ is ambiguous: it is not clear whether St Macrina
renders ‘sense organs’ with this term, or more generally ‘organs of the body’. Certainly, for
the soul to operate, the senses must be in the sense organs, both with the meaning that the
person must be alert and with the meaning that the sense organs must not be damaged.
However, St Macrina means, more generally, that the senses must be in the parts of the
body. If my arm is damaged, and paralysed, so that sense is absent, then my soul cannot
move my arm. The next part of the sentence is quite significant: it advances the doctrine that
the soul is an intelligible (noete) power which by means of the senses pervades and governs
the body just as if the body were its tool. Of course, this is very similar to our understanding
of the connection between the central nervous system and the organs of sense and, more
generally, the parts of the body. However, as should be clear, St Macrina is speaking merely
prescientifically only on the basis of the most rejectionist stance on the part of her reader: St
Gregory as author has already advanced with great cogency an argument why the soul cannot
be the body or a part of the body, so we must not take what St Macrina is saying simply to be
a prescientific grasp of the biology of the nervous system. Certainly the soul makes use of the
nervous system; about that there is no dispute. However, the soul is not the nervous system,
nor the functioning of the nervous system. The soul is an intelligible (noete) power which
pervades the body by means of the senses, and it is the soul, that intelligible (noete) power,
which by means of its own motions sets in motion the instrumental (organika) faculties of
sense towards that which seems good to the soul. It is curious that St Macrina has the soul
set in motion the faculties of sense towards what seems good to it. We would have thought,
say in the case of my raising my arm, that the she would have had the soul set my arm in
motion, not my faculties of sense. Perhaps she means that my arm is set in motion by my
soul through the instrumentality of my faculties of sense. We have supplied ‘good to it’ to
complete the meaning of the sentence. This should not be taken to be an assertion that all
men aim towards the good, or that St Macrina, here at any rate, is advancing such a notion.
The phrase she uses, ‘pros to dokoun’, has the clear meaning that the soul, being a self-
mover, sets the parts of the body in motion however it wants, towards what seems good or
appropriate or desirable or useful to it. There is no further sense of ‘The Good’ here; quite the
contrary, the term is used most often for an opinion. This analysis of human action should be
contrasted with St Thomas Aquinas’ own theory of human action.[2]

St Gregory is speaking:

I said, what therefore is the soul, if it is possible with a certain definition to

portray its nature, as would occur to us a certain comprehension of a subject by
means of a portrait?

And the teacher said: Some in one way, others in another way, declared the
definition concerning it, as it seemed good to each one defining it. Our own
opinion is of this sort: The soul is a substance (ousia) which has come to be
(genete), a living substance (ousia), mental (noera), implanting a force which is
full of life and which supports the senses in an organic (organiko) and
perceptive (aisthetiko) body as long as the nature receptive of these things
appears constituted.

This is St Macrina’s formal definition of the soul. Let us analyse it piece by piece.

‘The soul is a substance (ousia)…’: The soul is not a quality. We here take Aristotle’s
definition of substance, namely something which exists and in which qualities inhere.

‘Which has come to be (genete)…’: Due to the Aristotelian provenance, as it seems to us, of
the term genete, we have avoided translating it as ‘created’. Unfortunately, there is no
stylistically good way to render the term in English if ‘created’ be avoided. The meaning is
that the soul is not eternal. There was a time when it was not. The Aristotelian sense of the
term ‘genete’ is that the object to which it is applied has had—as that object—a beginning. In
Christian metaphysics, of course, this implies ‘created’. Hence, the soul is not coeternal with
God. (St Gregory himself has already stated that the soul is not of the same nature as God.)
The soul had a beginning. We will discuss the beginning of the soul in Chapter III. We will
later, in Volume II, encounter in the writings of Evagrius a category of things—‘those things
which have come to be’—the word for which has the same etymological root as genete.

‘A living substance (ousia),…’: This means that the soul is self-moving in a very deep sense: it
is alive in and of itself—although certainly not in the same sense, since it is genete, that Jesus
Christ is the ‘Way, the Truth and the Life’.[3] The soul is a substance one of whose properties
is that it is alive.

What does the soul eat if it is alive? Gnosis. This we will study in Volume II.

‘Mental (noera)…’: As we have already said, ‘noera’ has the basic sense of ‘possessing mind
or nous’. Not only is the soul alive, but it also possesses mind. St Macrina clearly is
delineating those qualities that we would associate with a living human person. The Fathers
in general do not use the concept of ‘consciousness’, but ‘possessing mind’ certainly would
include that idea; we will study this in more detail below. We will see that the Patristic
concept of mind (nous), as indeed the Classical Greek concept of mind (nous), is far broader
than what today in English we ordinarily convey with the term ‘intellect’. What ‘intellect’
conveys is the power of ratiocination—propositional reason or analysis. While that which
possesses mind (nous) certainly also possesses intellect (Greek: dianoia) in this sense, the
concept of mind (nous) involved in this formal definition of soul is far broader than the
concept of intellect: it includes, among other things, both the power of intuitive
apprehension of intelligible conceptions (ennoies) and the power of intuitive apprehension of
God himself.

There is an unfortunate tendency among Western translators in rendering such terms as

‘rational’ or ‘logical’, when referring to a quality characteristic of man or of the bodiless or
angelic powers, to render the terms in the sense of ‘intellect’ that we have just given. The
proper meaning is what St Macrina is now saying: ‘possessing mind (nous)’, where mind
(nous) has that broader sense that we have just indicated. This tendency of Western
translators of Classical and Patristic texts arises from the rationalism of Western philosophy
and theology, this rationalism having developed in the High Middle Ages with the
application of intensive logical techniques to philosophy and theology and having reached its
apogee in the psychology of St Thomas Aquinas.[4]
There is an equally unfortunate tendency, however, on the part of some Western converts to
the Orthodox Church who, reacting against the rationalism of their previous cultural milieu,
bring with them to the Orthodox Church an anti-intellectualist ideology that would make of
the Orthodox Church a place of mystical pietism. Both tendencies are wrong. Reason has a
place in the Orthodox Church.

‘Implanting…’: This need not be taken as anything other than ‘imparting’. The implication,
however, is that life comes to the body from the soul. Hence, St Macrina’s previous assertion
that the body without the soul is dead. This is of course quite Platonic, even Neoplatonic.

‘A force…’: We would say, a power. An energy. Remember that we are well before the
definition of force in Newtonian mechanics; hence, the word has the significance that it has
in Classical philosophy.

‘Which is full of life…’: We have translated this according to the dictionary, but it seems to be
stated on the analogy of ‘vivifying’. It is this force which enlivens or quickens the living body.

‘And which supports the senses…’: Again translating literally, we infer that what is meant is
that the sense organs do not operate without this force or power. When we are sleeping or
unconscious, this power is not in the organs of sense. When the sense organ is damaged, this
power no longer is able to support the sense of that organ. According to Aristotle, ‘The mind
sees,’ not the eye.[5] The mind sees through the instrumentality of the eye when the eye is
functioning according to its work (ergon). Aristotle himself explains what he means in this
way: if a man should go blind because of damage to his eyes, nonetheless, were he able to
change his eyes for new ones (!) he would see again, for it is the mind that is the agent of
perception whereas the eye is the instrument.[6]

‘In an organic (organiko)…’: ‘Organic (organiko)’ here has the Aristotelian meaning that the
body is biological, that it has organs, but the meaning of organiko could also be taken to be
‘of the nature of a tool’—that the body is used by the soul as a tool, the Platonic conception.
We have earlier adopted this second sense of organiko as better fitting the context.
‘And perceptive (aisthetiko)…’: The body has sense organs. It should be clear that we are
talking about the human soul here. Aristotle introduces distinctions of which St Macrina will
later make use.

‘Body…’: The body whose soul it is.

‘As long as the nature…’: The bodily nature.

‘Receptive of these things…’: In On the Making of Man, St Gregory discusses the necessity of
the integrity of the body for the soul to be able to express itself.[7] Just as the mind (here,
soul) needs the eye, and cannot see if the eye is damaged, so in general the bodily nature
which is receptive of these things—here we take this in the broad sense of all those aspects of
the body which serve to allow the immaterial soul to express in the sensible world its own
self-moved motions—must be intact for the soul to be able to express itself. In modern
language this would include the nervous system; however, it should be evident that for St
Macrina the soul is not the nervous system, nor its functioning. The soul is an immaterial
substance, ‘genete’, mental, possessing and implanting in the body a force which is full of life
and which supports the senses. This immaterial substance, the soul, makes use of the
nervous system and all the bodily organs, by means of the instrumentality of the nervous
system[8] in order to express in the sensible world its self-moved motions. If the faculties of
sense[9] are damaged, then the soul cannot express itself, not, however, itself being damaged
in any way. The same is true of the bodily organs—say, the arm—: if they are damaged, then
the soul cannot express its self-moved motions, not, however, for all that, itself necessarily
being damaged.

‘Appears constituted.’: This appears to include the notion that we have just discussed of the
necessity of the integrity of the body for the soul to be able to express its self-moved motions,
even in the case where the body, and the person, are still alive. It also covers the case where
the person dies and the body disintegrates: the soul is no longer able to do anything, since
the ‘nature receptive of these things’ no longer ‘appears constituted’.

Now, what really is St Macrina saying?

First, she has avoided the Aristotelian definition of the soul, which, while difficult to
understand, tends to a ‘function of the body’ conception of the soul.[10] St Macrina’
definition is quite Platonic.[11]

Next, St Macrina has given primacy to the soul. The soul enlivens the body.

Next, St Macrina clearly states that the soul works through the body. The body is the soul’s
instrument. Moreover, the soul is limited in its expression but not in its integrity by the
integrity of the body. In On the Making of Man,[12] St Gregory is quite clear that damage to
the body may prevent the soul from expressing itself, but, for all that, the soul retains its own
integrity. This Patristic position is quite important to understand with respect to discussions
of bioethical issues concerning brain death as a preliminary to removal of organs from an
otherwise living person for the sake of transplant.

In St Macrina’s and St Gregory’s view, damage to the body—say to the fore-brain—does not
imply damage to the soul. This of course is completely alien and contrary to the materialistic
philosophy underlying the paradigm of brain death in medicine today: as we have pointed
out, that paradigm treats, as an ethical judgement, the patient as having lost his ‘personhood’
when his higher brain centres no longer show electrical activity, although his lower brain
centres may continue to show electrical activity and his respiration may continue, perhaps
with technical assistance. The criterion that the current medical paradigm provides for is
based both on the concept of a humanly meaningful life and on the utilitarian benefit to
others who have need of the patient’s organs. The patient’s life, from a humanistic point of
view, may not be meaningful, but that does not mean that the patient is dead—that his soul
has permanently departed. There is an unavoidable clash here between two philosophies of
man, one humanistic and based on pragmatic, utilitarian considerations, and the other
Orthodox Christian. We cannot in this study enter into this matter in depth; we will do so in
another work in which we will deal with bioethical issues in general. Moreover, since St
Macrina’s definition is a thoroughgoing vitalist definition of the soul, we would do well to
postpone a detailed discussion of its implications in regard to the molecular biology of
conception and in regard to related bioethical issues in the genetic engineering and cloning
of humans. We will touch briefly on these matters in Chapter III, however, when we look at
On the Making of Man.
[1] ‘Motion’ throughout has the broad Aristotelian sense of displacement in space, change in quality, or generation or
corruption.

[2] This analysis, which can be found in St Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, is summarized in Chapter 33 (‘Thomas
Aquinas on human action’ by A. Donagan) of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Medieval). We
will discuss St Thomas’ theory of action in detail in Chapter IV, below.

[8] St Macrina says: by means of the instrumental faculties of sense.

[9] Let us say today: including the nervous system.

[11] For a broad treatment by Fr Copleston of the tension between the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the soul
in Classical philosophy, see the whole of Section 5 just cited in the previous fn.

Chapter I -- 14

Let us continue:

And when she said this, she showed with her hand the doctor occupied with the
treatment of her body, who was sitting there, and said: The testimony is near to
us of those things which are being said. For how does this doctor, placing on the
artery the touch of his finger, hear after a fashion by means of the sense of
touch when the nature [of the body] cries out to him and narrates its own
passions? For the illness is in intensified state in the body and the illness leaps
from these very entrails, and by that much more the intensification of the fire
[in the arteries] is extended. He is taught by the eye other such things, looking
at the figure of reclining and at the rotting of the flesh, and how the kind of
colour, pale and bilious, indicates the disposition within, and the gaze of the
eyes, being spontaneously inclined towards sorrow and pain; and in like
manner the hearing becomes the teacher of similar things, recognizing the
passion from the denseness of the laboured breathing and the sigh that
accompanies the breath. One would say that not even the sense of smell of the
scientist is neglectful of the passion, but that, by means of a certain quality of
the breath, it recognizes the sickness hidden in the entrails. Therefore, if there
were not an intelligible (noete) force which were present in each of the senses,
what would the hand of itself teach us, unless the conception (ennoia) were not
guiding the touch towards knowledge (gnosis) of the subject? What, then,
would the hearing divorced from the intellect (dianoia), or the eye, or the
nostril, or other faculty of sense, work together towards the knowledge (gnosis)
of what is sought if each one of these faculties were by itself only? But the most
true thing of all is what one of those who have been educated in pagan letters is
well recorded as having said: ‘Mind (nous) is what sees and mind (nous) is what
hears.’

If you will not grant that this is true, how, tell me, looking towards the sun as
you have been taught by the teacher to see, not as much as it appears to the
many, that much you say it is in the measure of the circumference, but that in
measure it exceeds by many times the whole earth? Is it not that you have had
the confidence to declare that it is this way, having followed a certain kind of
movement and the temporal and spatial intervals and the causes of eclipses in
your intellect through those things which appear? And when you see the waning
and waxing of the moon, sight teaches you other such things by means of the
shape which appears around the element, that in its own nature the moon is not
radiant, that it rotates round the earth and that it shines from the rays of the
sun as by nature happens with mirrors, which, accepting the sun on themselves,
do not give back their own rays, but the rays of sunlight, which are reflected
back from the smooth and polished surface? Which very thing appears to those
who see without examining, that the light is from the moon itself. It is shown
that the matter is not so, for when the moon happens to be facing the sun across
a diameter it is illumined in the whole disk which faces us…

[We omit a discussion of the phases of the moon.]

Do you see of what things sight becomes for you a teacher, not, however, as if
providing by itself the contemplation of matters of this sort, if there were not
something [in addition] which were seeing by means of the eyes and which,
making use, as of some guides, of those things which are perceived according to
sense-perception, were penetrating through those things which appear to those
things which do not appear?

First of all, we have eliminated solely because of its length the discussion of the phases of the
moon. It is a quite accurate discussion of the phases of the moon based on the geocentric
model, in which the moon revolves round the earth in an orbit which is inside the orbit of the
sun, which also revolves round the earth. Otherwise the discussion is quite useful. In general,
astronomy in St Macrina’s time had reached a very high level: St Augustine, writing in the
Confessions within twenty-five years of the time of our dialogue, remarks that the
astronomers of his time had reached the stage not only of predicting partial eclipses, but of
specifying which part of the celestial body would be eclipsed. The problem, St Augustine
says, is that the astronomers in their pride did not give the glory to God.

What is St Macrina saying, however? The gist of what she is saying is this: ‘Mind (nous) is
what sees and mind (nous) is what hears.’ We have already stated that Aristotle says this in
On the Soul, which is true. The French translator of On the Soul and the Resurrection,
Terrieux, states, however, that the source of this adage is Epicharmos, a Pythagorean.[1]
Whence we conclude that one quoted the other, something that shows the hoariness of this
adage in Greek philosophy.

The point that St Macrina is making is that the doctor would get nothing of value from his
sense organs in the examination of the patient (St Macrina herself), unless he had both mind
(nous) and a conception (ennoia) in his mind (nous) which were guiding him in the use of
his sense organs in the examination. Similarly, St Gregory himself, says his sister,
understands the relative sizes of the sun and the earth because he has a conception (ennoia)
in his mind that he has been taught which interprets the data of sense-perception; and,
similarly, he understands both the phases of the moon and the fact that the light of the moon
is the reflected light of the sun because he has been taught a conception (ennoia) which
interprets appropriately the data he has from sense-perception.

Now, the significance of these things for St Macrina’s arguments for the existence of the
intelligible soul is this: There is a certain connection between soul (psuche) and mind (nous).
Let us leave that for the moment, since St Macrina herself will later address the relationship
between these two things. She has said, however, that the soul, which possesses mind (nous),
is immaterial and inapprehensible by sense-perception and that it can only be discovered by
its operations or motions in the world of sense. Here, the soul of the doctor, and his mind
(nous), are inapprehensible in themselves. However, that the doctor can make a diagnosis by
means of his sense organs indicates his possession of mind (nous), and proves that he must
have in his mind (nous) a conception (ennoia) which is above sense-perception and which is
guiding the use of his senses in his examination of his patient. For what does the doctor’s eye
or ear know about medicine? Similarly, the knowledge that St Gregory himself has of
astronomy cannot be reduced to sense-perception, since the simple sense-perceptions in
these cases are in fact deceiving: the sun, contrary to the simple sense-perception of the solar
disk, is many times larger than the earth; the light of the moon, contrary to simple sense-
perception, is reflected sunlight; the waning and waxing of the moon, the basic datum of
sense-perception, is explained by the rotation of the moon about the earth; and so on.

St Macrina’s point, therefore, is that without sense-perceptions, we do not learn anything

about the world of sense, but that without mind (nous), we can do nothing with our sense-
perceptions. ‘Mind (nous) is what sees and mind (nous) is what hears.’ Mind (nous) is the
agent of perception, and the sense organs are the instruments of sense-perception.

Now St Macrina has said that the doctor examining her has a conception (ennoia) in his
mind (nous) guiding the use of his sense organs in the examination. What does she mean?
What is this conception (ennoia)? In the case of the doctor, this is clear: his conception
(ennoia) is his medical knowledge. As St Macrina herself points out, the doctor in placing his
finger on the artery has a conception (ennoia) of the physiology of the body wherein the fire
courses through the artery, and in the case of an intensification of the illness, the fire which
springs forth from the entrails courses through the artery with a greater intensity: by means
of his touch on the artery, the doctor is measuring the intensity of the fire coursing through
the artery. Speaking in a crude way, we can say that the doctor’s conception (ennoia) is a
model of the physiology of man, a model which includes interpretations of symptoms of
illness as variations on the normal physiology of man. Now, this model is something that the
doctor has in his mind (nous). In the present case, it is propositional and it is something that
can be taught. This is even clearer in the astronomical examples, where St Macrina refers
explicitly to the interpretative nature of the model with respect to sense-perception and to
the fact that St Gregory was taught the model. However, the model is not merely
propositional, and this will be important for us later, when we comment on St Gregory’s
presentation of a mechanistic theory of mind (nous). The doctor certainly makes intuitive
judgements,[2] and he certainly combines disparate elements, even propositional, of what he
has been taught and of what he has learned by experience, into something which we might
call, informally, ‘judgement’ and which is not exercised by means of syllogisms or even
algorithms (computer programs), but intuitively. And, as we shall see, it is the mind (nous)
that makes these judgements. The content of mind (nous)—crudely, the model—on the basis
of which the judgement is made—say, in the use of touch on the artery in making a diagnosis
—is the conception (ennoia).

Now, it surely has not been lost on the reader that neither the medicine of St Macrina’s time
nor the astronomy of her time has survived. These models have been superseded by other
models. It is even fashionable to disparage the models of former times, as if today’s models
will not themselves tomorrow be superseded—and similarly disparaged. The models in the
examples given are contingent. This of course raises the question—well, then, what is the
significance of the conception (ennoia) that St Macrina is talking about, since it itself is
contingent? In the cases given, this is true. However, despite the contingent nature, in the
examples given, of the conception (ennoia) that the mind (nous) has, St Macrina can still
assert the autonomous existence of the mind (nous) apart from sense-perception and can
also still assert the necessary role of the conception (ennoia) in the interpretation of sense-
perception, a conception (ennoia) which is not reducible to sense-perception. Moreover,
when, in Volume II, we turn to the ascetical psychology of Evagrius, we will see that the
mystic is interested in conceptions (ennoies) which have a more absolute character. For if the
conceptions (ennoies) that a mystic had of God and the angels were merely contingent, or
even merely subjective, why would the mystic waste his time in the desert? That is not to say
that mystical knowledge is complete from the first instant of illumination, but that is another
matter.

We used the term ‘intuitive’ just above. This deserves some comment. We spoke earlier of the
mind’s (nous’) having the potential to apprehend intuitively, intelligible conceptions
(ennoies). In our discussion of St Macrina’s examples just above, however, we had in mind a
somewhat less exalted sort of intuition: when the doctor places his finger on the artery, he
does not engage in syllogistic reasoning—although, to an extent he might—: he forms a
judgement. This judgement is formed, we want to say, ‘intuitively’. Here, we are using
‘intuitively’ in opposition to ‘by means of a formal logical procedure or deduction’. The
doctor is not a computer; he does not have a program embedded in his brain which
systematically lists all the possible cases and evaluates the touch on the artery systematically
on the basis of all the possible cases. The doctor forms a judgement, although, as we said, he
might engage in some syllogistic reasoning; he might recall some things that he had been
taught; he might recall some things that he had seen in other such cases; he might recall
some medical adages and rules of thumb. The judgement the doctor forms intuitively,
however. Very few doctors today in making a medical visit would blindly follow a strictly
mechanical procedure, imitating a computer.

It is clear from the context that St Macrina means her examples to be examples of
conceptions (ennoies) which are above sense-perception. However, when we, in our
commentary, earlier spoke of the intuitive apprehension of intelligible conceptions (ennoies)
which were above sense-perception, we had in mind more the conceptions (ennoies) which
were of spiritual realities; that is, we were referring to the content of contemplations in the
spiritual sense. In the case of spiritual contemplations, the mind (nous) is led to the
conception (ennoia) independently of sense-perception, and, as we shall learn in Volume II,
sense-perception impedes the process. In St Macrina’s examples of the doctor and
astronomy, however, sense-perception is the necessary starting-point for the mind (nous). In
the case of the doctor, sense-perception is a starting-point in two senses: First, when he is
learning medicine, the doctor must be led by means of sense-perception to intelligible
conceptions (ennoies) of a propositional nature. Second, when he is applying his now-
existing medical knowledge to a patient, he must, in the interpretation of the primary data of
sense-perception, be guided by the intelligible conception (ennoia) which is his medical
knowledge; and he must be led by sense-perception to an intelligible conception (ennoia)
which gives him an understanding of the patient’s condition and prospects.

It is important to understand, however, that, even in the examples given by St Macrina, there
is a gulf between what St Macrina is saying and what Hume is saying in his empiricist
program. For Hume explicitly rejects the existence of mind (nous) and bases all cognition
strictly on sense-perceptions, passions and emotions, and on the association of the mental
images of these things; here St Macrina is asserting that the intelligible conception (ennoia)
is not what Hume asserts it to be.
In St Macrina’s view, those things which appear—that is, the phenomena given in sense-
perception—act as guides to the mind (nous) to arrive at conceptions (ennoies) which are not
sense-perceptions. Thus the doctor is led from the touch on the artery to a judgement as to
the interior condition of the entrails. Although the doctor has been trained in medicine and
does not receive his medical knowledge by mystical revelation, these medical truths are not,
for St Macrina, due to the association of mental images of sense-perceptions, passions or
emotions, which is Hume’s position. For St Macrina, the sense-perceptions act as guides—
pointers—for the mind (nous). Furthermore, for St Macrina, the mind (nous) has an
autonomous, objective existence although it is intelligible and not subject to apprehension by
the eye or ear: its existence can only be inferred from its operations in the living body of a
person; those operations of the living body are what can be seen or heard. Hume and all
those who stand in the empiricist tradition vehemently reject this position. This is a
fundamental difference between the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa and the
anthropology that we have ascribed to the materialistic and mechanistic philosophical
paradigm underlying modern biology. In the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa, man is
characterized by the possession of a mental or spiritual substance (noera ousia), a substance
which ‘possesses mind’—this is the soul of man—whereas in the anthropology that we have
ascribed to the materialistic and mechanistic school, man is simply one species of material
animal, a species characterized by a large brain, this large brain having evolved fortuitously.
The very existence of an intelligible substance such as the soul (psuche) or mind (nous) of
man is vehemently rejected in this second anthropology, all the operations of mind (nous)
that St Macrina is ascribing to a mental (noeros) substance being ascribed by this second
school to the functioning of the brain: Hume’s anthropology, his psychology, his theory of
cognition, his ethics represent an early modern attempt to delineate a theory of man which is
consistent with this materialistic philosophy. The consequences of this fundamental
difference in philosophical anthropology or psychology are immense.

St Macrina, in her examples, has used two illustrations—that of medical diagnosis using
sensible signs to point to the illness and that of astronomical observation to point to the
theoretical understanding of the heavens—wherein the conception (ennoia) that the mind
(nous) attains to is propositional: the patient has such-and-such an illness and will not
survive; the sun is so large. We might say that what the mind (nous) attains to is a conceptual
model which provides an interpretative framework for the comprehension of sense-
perceptions. Moreover, as we have pointed out, the model in both cases is contingent.
We take the position that human conceptions (ennoies) are always contingent, that another
model is always to be expected. In a thousand years, will the general theory of relativity be
the orthodoxy in cosmology? We doubt it. A sophisticated empiricist would say, however: It
is the empiricist program that must remain, not a certain model, for the models are
contingent.

We shall see, however, that for the religious monk the attainment of his mind (nous) to
intelligible conceptions (ennoies) will include not only contingent human propositional
conceptions (ennoies), but also spiritual conceptions (ennoies) concerning created things
(the reasons (logoi) of created objects), of the angelic powers and, finally, of God himself. We
will also see that these higher conceptions (ennoies) are no longer propositional. These
higher spiritual conceptions (ennoies) enlighten the mind (nous) so that the mind (nous)
apprehends intuitively[3] those truths that are attained in contemplation. However, as we
will discuss later, these spiritual intelligible conceptions (ennoies), although apprehended
intuitively, are partial: man cannot contain in himself either in breadth or in depth the
knowledge that God has.

Let us continue. St Macrina is still speaking.

Why is it necessary to add the geometrical proofs which lead us by the hand
from the sensible engravings towards those things which are above sense, and
countless other things in addition to these things, by means of which things the
proposition is constituted that comprehension concerning the mental
substance (noera ousia) hidden in our nature occurs by means of those things
which are set in motion in us bodily?

This of course is the final formulation of the program. ‘Mental substance’ might also be
translated ‘spiritual substance’. It is the soul, in accordance with St Macrina’s formal
definition. We comprehend the mental substance which is the soul by means of those things
which are set in motion in us bodily, and hence sensibly, by the immaterial, and hence
sensibly inapprehensible, soul.
We do not think it necessary to dwell on the proof from geometry: St Macrina’s sense is
simply that geometrical—and, in general, mathematical—truths are by their nature not
sensible—nor even, we ourselves might add today, due to the association of the mental
images of sense-perceptions. They are examples of conceptions (ennoies) that only an
intelligible mental substance (noera ousia) might have, to which the mind (nous) that the
mental substance (noera ousia) possesses is guided by means of the sensible geometrical—
or, in general, mathematical—diagrams and examples. Note however, that while the
argument for them bears obvious resemblances to an argument for Plato’s theory of Forms,
these conceptions (ennoies) have not been defined nor have they been connected specifically
either to Plato’s Forms or to any theory of innate ideas. Moreover, nothing has been said
about their relation to knowledge (gnosis). Let us ourselves leave these matters alone for the
moment. Let us remark, however, that we are clearly a long way from any treatment of
geometry or mathematics as a formal system. It is well also to remark that the example of
being led from the geometrical diagram to the abstract geometrical conception (ennoia)
clarifies for the reader who is uncertain what St Macrina means by an intelligible conception
(ennoia), just what an intelligible conception (ennoia) is. For it is clear that St Macrina
considers that it is an abstract conception (the geometrical concept), one to which the mind
(nous) is led by a consideration of sense-perception (the geometrical diagram) but which is
not sense-perception (the geometrical diagram itself) nor due to the association of mental
images of sense-perceptions (the geometrical diagram seen many times): the geometrical
diagram ‘points’ to the intelligible conception or ennoia (the geometrical concept or truth),
which must be grasped mentally by the mind (nous).

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[1] Soul F p. 80, fn. 1.

[2] In the everyday acceptation of the phrase.

[3] Not propositionally; here we intend ‘intuitive’ in its philosophical sense.

 Chapter I -- 15

The next passage is critical. St Gregory is speaking:

What then, I said, if, just as the quality of being material is common to the
sensible nature of the elements, the difference being great as concerns the
particular qualities in each species of matter—for movement in them is from
the opposite, the one tending to rise, the other falling to earth; the species is not
the same and the quality is different—if according to the same reasoning one
were to say that some of these things were the force which, being conjoined,
operated these intellectual (noetikas) imaginations and movements from a
natural property and force, as truly we see many things set in motion by the
makers of machines in which the matter artfully arranged mimics nature—not
only in the shape showing the similarity but it even happens to have motion and
portrays a certain sound, the machine sounding in the voice-producing part—
and we do not see, I presume, any intelligible (noeten) power in those things
that happen that would work each aspect of the shape, the appearance, the
sound, the motion? If we should say that these things also occur in regard to
this very mechanical instrument of our nature, there having been admixed no
intelligible substance of any special kind at all, but there lying in the nature of
the elements which are in us a certain motive force, and such an operation is
the result, which operation is nothing else but a certain impulsive motion set in
operation towards the knowledge (gnosis) of those things which are studied—
by means of these things what would be more proven: that that intelligible and
bodiless substance of the soul existed in itself or that it did not exist at all?

We are several years prior to 400 ad. We have a complete statement of the materialistic and
mechanistic paradigm in biology and neurophysiology. In Volume II, we will see that
Evagrius, a contemporary of St Gregory, will use dreams to diagnose with precision the
psychological condition of the ascetic, and even his stage of ascetical progress. Is this not
astonishing? Why should these things be so?

These men and women were trained in Athens, or else trained by those who were trained in
Athens, in pagan philosophy—Classical Greek philosophy—, which included the science of
the day. This is what we meant in saying earlier that St Macrina shared, as a Christian from a
long-standing Christian family, in the intellectual culture of her late Classical peers. That
these men and women write and speak in a manner relevant to our own epoch suggests that
the intellectual culture of our own time is a return to the sensibility of the late Classical Age
of Greece and Rome.

In what might this similarity or return be constituted? We think it might be, on the one
hand, the denial of God of our own epoch, and, on the other hand, its emphasis on reason. As
to the denial of God, this is evident not only in the universities of the West but even on its
streets. As to the emphasis on reason, we are saying nothing new; that was the triumph of
the Enlightenment.

There is a tendency today to seek an outlet for more religious, divine or transcendental
aspirations in mysticism; these tendencies are perhaps similar to those which prompted the
Romantic in his irrational quest and activity. This mysticism is often healthy; sometimes,
however, it can be deranged or disturbed, being a naïve reaction against the excessive
rationalism of the person’s environment.

We will see mysticism as we progress, a mysticism based on hard work and lucidity, humility
and sobriety, a mysticism that is radically Christ-centred, a mysticism that seeks the
apprehension of the Divine but avoids excess, ecstasy—here taken to signify loss of self-
control and sobriety—and delusion.

To return to the matter at hand, St Gregory is posing the radical rejection of anything other
than sensible (material) elements and their forces in human nature. This is his statement of
the mechanistic argument against the existence of the human soul that we announced
earlier.

St Gregory is saying this: The elements have this in common: they are material.[1] But the
elements differ in their various qualities. (Here, St Gregory is following Plato and Aristotle.)
Some elements are light, some heavy, and so on. We might say today that various
compounds have different chemical properties, but it is true that the elements themselves
have different chemical and physical properties. What if the conjunction of these elements or
compounds should by its own very nature produce a certain force or power that works the
intelligible imaginations and movements? St Gregory clearly is trying to encompass all
mental phenomena or events taken either subjectively or objectively, including those
operations of mind (nous) in the body that his sister, St Macrina, has said manifest the
existence of the immaterial soul (psuche). ‘By its own very nature’ here means: ‘naturally,
according to the natural properties of the elements or compounds combined’. St Macrina has
said that behind the motions[2] of the living person is the sensibly inapprehensible but
nonetheless existent soul (psuche). St Gregory is saying: well maybe that supposed sensibly
inapprehensible soul, including its mental acts, is nothing other than the result of a force or
power that arises from the conjunction of the elements in the body of the living person?

This is very similar to the argument that is today called ‘epiphenomenalism’, the argument
that we already saw to be expressed by the Nobel laureate, Jacques Monod, in Le hasard et
la nécessité.

This is molecular biology. The person in this argument is his molecular biology. Let us make
the difference precise. St Macrina has said that there is some immaterial mental (noera)
substance which sees by means of the instrumentality of the eye, hears by means of the
instrumentality of the ear and so forth. St Gregory is saying: well maybe there is no
immaterial substance which is the agent of perception, but just as the eye is a mechanical
(molecular biological) instrument at the disposal of the supposed mind (nous), so perhaps all
the mental phenomena that we associate with this supposed mind (nous) are in fact nothing
other than the mechanical operations of molecular biology?

St Gregory continues with an example. The machine-maker arranges matter artfully and the
machine mimics nature—this is a robot—not only in shape (it looks like a man) but also in
movement and voice, and all of this without any intelligible force or power—mind (nous)—
being present in the machine. The machine operates mechanically but seems alive for all
that.

We ourselves are reminded of Turing’s Test, which provides a behavioural criterion for
artificial intelligence. Of course Alan Turing (1912–1954), the English mathematician, lived
long after St Gregory’s time.
What St Gregory wants to say is this: Well, maybe we’re just fancy machines—molecular
biological systems—and what you say is ‘mind’ or ‘soul’—some immaterial substance
animating an otherwise dead body—doesn’t exist? This of course is the dominant model in
positivist circles, and the dominant model in biology and a fortiori bioethics.

St Gregory continues: In our own body, perhaps there is no special intelligible substance
such as mind or soul, but only a certain natural force or power of the chemical compounds of
the body able to set things in motion in such a way that the supposed operations of ‘mind’ are
the result, which operations are nothing other than a certain natural biological movement of
the brain operating on the things that we try to learn such as medicine or astronomy? Here,
St Gregory is replying to St Macrina’s assertion that the mind (nous) is led from sense-
perceptions to a conception (ennoia) which is above sense-perception in the process of
learning medicine or astronomy or in the process of applying that medical or astronomical
knowledge. St Gregory is saying: maybe that ‘being led from sense-perception’ which
supposedly indicates the hidden presence of mind (nous) as the bearer of intelligible
conceptions (ennoies) is simply a ‘certain impulsive movement’ which arises from the
natural properties of the molecular compounds of the body? In other words, maybe this
supposed mind (nous) is simply the molecular biology of the brain and this supposed ‘being
led to an intelligible conception (ennoia) in an immaterial mind (nous)’ is nothing other than
a ‘certain impulsive movement’ which arises from the particular chemical properties of the
compounds of the brain? We can view this ‘certain impulsive movement’ as an Epicurean
habituation or Humean association of sense-perceptions, passions and emotions, actualized
in the molecular biology of the brain neurons. This being so, what else would be proved
except that that intelligible and bodiless substance—the soul—would be completely nothing
at all?

In other words, perhaps the supposed soul (psuche) is reducible to the molecular biology of
the body? Or, equivalently, perhaps the supposed mind (nous) is reducible to the molecular
biology of the brain?

St Gregory of Nyssa’s argument is similar in structure to the sceptical refutation by

Carneades (214–129 bc), the founder of the New Academy, of the Stoic argument from the
design seen in the world to the existence of God, the Designer.[3] Moreover, it is similar to
attempts by modern materialistic controversialists to refute the argument of the Weaver
from the garment by adducing ‘proofs’ that the garment could have come about merely by
chance.

As we have remarked, there is a school of psychology—humanistic psychology—which treats

religious experiences as natural phenomena on the basis of the materialistic and mechanistic
anthropology that St Gregory here is delineating in counter-argument to his sister, St
Macrina. This school proceeds to study the induction of religious experience by natural
(physical) means. In this view, the Jesus Prayer is simply a mantra—one among many
mantras—, and the experience of the Uncreated Light a natural phenomenon that can be
induced by any one mantra among the many, or even by other natural means. In this view,
religious experience might be considered a matter of short-circuiting the brain in the right
way or of altering its molecular biological constitution and operations in the right way. This
of course is not the doctrine of the Orthodox Church, nor our own view. Still, in America, one
can buy cassettes that teach one to pray the Jesus Prayer as a means of relaxation; one can
learn to do T’ai Chi Ch’uan for equilibrated peace of mind. These things are quite real as
social phenomena. Their root as social phenomena today in the West is the model that St
Gregory is advancing as a counter-argument to his sister’s argument for the existence of the
soul: that, in modern terms, the person is merely the molecular biology of his body. We have
devoted a considerable part of this work to the anthropology underlying the Jesus Prayer as
prayed by monks in order to clarify the differences between the anthropology underlying the
Orthodox practice of the Jesus Prayer, especially in its higher forms, and the anthropology
today current in the West, derived from materialistic and mechanistic models and paradigms
in physics and the biological sciences.

To return to St Gregory, given his epoch, he has given a prescient description of the
materialistic and mechanistic paradigm in neurobiology.

What is St Macrina’s answer?

She, then, said, the example also works in alliance with our argument, and the
whole construction of the rebuttal brought against us will contribute not a little
to the certainty of those things which we have thought.
How do you say this?

She said: For truly that one should thus know how to handle and dispose the
soulless matter, so that the art which must be placed in the mechanisms should
become almost like a soul in the matter, by means of which things the
mechanism makes a pretence of movement and sound and shapes and other
such things—this would be a proof that there is something of this sort in man
which has the nature, by means of the contemplative and inventive force, to
understand in itself these things and to construct in advance in the intellect
(dianoia) the mechanisms and then, by means of art, to bring thus into
operation, and by means of the matter to show, the thought (noema).

What is St Macrina saying? In the case of a robot, the art of the robot-maker must become
like a soul in the material of the robot so that the robot makes a convincing mimicry of
nature. But the robot-maker must apply that art. He must know how to handle and arrange
the soulless matter so that his art becomes a kind of soul in the robot, on the basis of which
‘soul’—the robot-maker’s art—the robot makes a convincing pretence of human movement,
voice, gesture and so on. But the very fact that a man can do this, that he can design and
construct a robot, is proof that there is something in man—mind (nous)—that by means of its
contemplative and inventive force or power can understand within itself (‘in the mind’s eye’)
the art of robot-making, can design the robot, and, by means of art or skill operating on
matter, can actualize the design of the robot in matter. The gist of this argument is that to be
able to design and construct a robot—recall that St Gregory has counter-argued that perhaps
we are all natural robots without mind (nous)—man must have mind (nous).

Turing’s Test involves placing a candidate machine that might demonstrate artificial
intelligence in a closed room, or box, and a man in a separate closed room, or box. A
different man who does not know who is who comes and plies each room or box with
questions by means of a teletypewriter (or computer terminal). Each room or box replies
with answers in the same way. If the questioner cannot distinguish the machine from the
man, then the machine is construed to have artificial intelligence.

Let us take a familiar example that is a variant of Turing’s Test, and in which the machine, a
computer, has won. Chess programs have been written which have defeated the world chess
champion under standard tournament conditions of play. The chess programs, however,
were very carefully programmed. Moreover, the chess programs did not mimic the thinking
processes of chess masters. They solved a problem—chess—which happens to be susceptible
of solution by means of tedious and long-winded computation of all possible consequences of
a move. Some work had previously been done with evaluative algorithms (subprograms)
which allow a quicker computation by eliminating from further consideration, according to
certain preprogrammed criteria, useless or inferior lines of play. However, computers today
are so fast that these evaluative algorithms were unnecessary: brute force was enough to beat
the best chess player alive, even under tournament time control.[4]

What St Macrina is saying is that the very existence of such chess programs is a major
argument in her favour. For, she says, there must be something in man that can, through a
contemplative and inventive power, understand in advance in itself, design in advance in the
intellect, manifest through matter, and bring into operation through art or skill, the thought
of that very chess program. Moreover, that chess program, conceived and executed by the
human mind (nous), becomes like a soul in the computer.

One might say that an argument against today’s materialistic controversialists who deny the
existence of God and the soul is that there must be something in them that can think up all
those arguments against the existence of God and the soul.

St Macrina continues with a detailed description of how the mechanisms that St Gregory has
referred to were constructed. We omit it. We continue with the conclusion of her description:

…Is it not manifestly demonstrated, therefore, by means of those things which appear
sensibly, that there is a certain mind (nous) in man, some other sort of thing than a
thing which appears sensibly, which, by the formless and mental quality (noero) of its
own nature, in its own thoughts constructs these things in advance in itself and then
brings thus into actuality, by means of the material services, the thought (dianoia)
constituted within?

If it were, according to the reasoning opposed to us, that one should ascribe
these wonder-workings [i.e. the primitive robots] to the nature of the elements,
then at all events the mechanisms would be constituted spontaneously for us:
the blacksmith would not await art for a metal puppet to occur, but directly
from nature such a thing would be; neither would the air have a requirement
for the pipe [i.e. the organ-pipe used in producing the sounds] for the sake of
the sound, but the air would always sound by itself, according to the event
flowing and being moved; the upward movement of the water would not be
forced by a pipe, art pressing hard by pressures the movement towards [a
motion] contrary to nature, but spontaneously the water would move towards
the mechanism, by its own nature being channelled upward.

These are details of the construction and operation of one of these mechanisms, which
existed in St Macrina’s day. What St Macrina is saying is that if the construction of such a
mechanism did not require mind (nous) working by means of art actualized in matter, but
was due merely to the natural forces of the elements, then such machines would assemble
themselves and operate spontaneously. Today we might say that if there were no mind
(nous) and the supposed workings of the computer and the chess program were due to the
natural properties of the elements, then the computer would assemble itself spontaneously;
the chess program would write itself spontaneously; the chess program would load itself into
the computer spontaneously; and the computer would begin operation spontaneously,
having plugged itself into a wall socket. Evidently St Macrina is dwelling on the difference
between purposeful human actions and natural phenomena, and passing from the analysis of
mental phenomena as depending on the natural properties of the elements (which we, and,
presumably, her brother, St Gregory, would take to be the elements of our bodies) to a
consideration of whether these primitive robots could arise from the natural properties of
the elements taken in a far more general sense as the elements occurring generally in nature.
We will comment on this argument below.

If, then, of these things nothing is set in operation spontaneously by the nature
of the elements, but by art each is led in accordance with one’s preference; and
if art is a certain firm thought (dianoia) set in motion towards a certain goal by
means of materials; and thought (dianoia) is a certain native movement and
operation of the mind—then, by those things that have been set against us, the
chain of things said has therefore proved that the mind is something other than
a thing that appears sensibly.
Before beginning, let us note the definition of ‘dianoia’. This word can be translated
‘intellect’, ‘thought’ or ‘purpose’, and ‘thought’ here better fits the context. Thought (dianoia)
is a native movement and operation of the mind (nous). What is being said is this: The mind
(nous) is a substance. That substance is here one of a category of substances that can set
themselves in motion without there being anything that has previously set them in motion.
The mind (nous) is an autonomous mover, a self-mover. Moreover, according to St Macrina
it is intelligible and not sensible. It is an intelligible self-mover. Now one of its native
movements and operations is thought (dianoia). ‘Movement’ (or, ‘motion’) and ‘operation’
are Aristotelian terms. They are virtually synonymous: ‘movement (kinesis)’ need not mean
physical displacement; it does mean change, and one type of change is physical
displacement. The word ‘operation (energeia)’ here means ‘function’ in the sense of ‘activity’;
‘function’ as ‘result’ (ergon) we have consistently translated ‘work’. Thus thought (dianoia) is
a native movement (kinesis) and activity (energeia) of the intelligible substance called mind
(nous). However, we should point out that we normally translate ‘dianoia’ by ‘intellect’. In
those cases the above considerations still apply.

Now, what is St Macrina saying?

She is saying that if the chess program is not a spontaneous product of nature engendered
without human intervention by the natural forces inherent in the elements, but is created by
art or skill, and if art or skill is a certain firm thought set in motion towards a certain goal—
here, beating the world chess champion—and actualized in materials—someone must design
and write and test and correct the chess program—then mind (nous) is shown to be
something other than what appears sensibly. St Macrina’s logic is the following: She has
indicated that the fact that the chess program is created proves the existence of mind (nous).
She now says that the fact that the chess program and computer do not assemble themselves
spontaneously indicates that mind (nous) is not something sensible.

This argument has a flaw.

St Gregory said: well, what if what we call mind (nous) is simply the molecular biology of the
brain? St Macrina has answered, since the chess program did not—and cannot—come into
being spontaneously, there must be a mind (nous) that created the program and realized it in
matter, and that mind (nous) must be other than a sensible thing. The flaw is this: As far as
she goes in proving the existence of mind (nous), St Macrina is on solid ground. Her logic
that would prove that that mind (nous) could not be sensible is unclear, however. What St
Macrina in effect does not address is her brother’s point: maybe the mind (nous) that created
the chess program is the molecular biology of the chess programmer’s brain, nothing more?
That is, yes, the programmer created the chess program; it did not come into being
spontaneously by the natural forces of nature. But when the programmer created the
program, was he anything other than a concourse of biochemical reactions?

It might be remarked in St Macrina’s favour that she does not seem to see how one could
pass from ‘natural forces of the elements of nature’—surely a deterministic concept—to
‘purposeful human behaviour’, in the present case conceiving, designing, writing and testing
a chess program to beat the world chess champion. That is, she does not seem able to
conceive the notion that the mind (nous) might be merely a concourse of biochemical
reactions in the brain, since the latter are subject to the deterministic laws of nature whereas
the former is a purposeful agent. While this problem is today largely ignored in the
materialistic mechanistic paradigm, St Macrina is right: an account must be given by the
materialist-mechanist of how the purposeful agent can arise out of deterministic chemical
reactions. We discuss this further below.

Let us return, however, to the problem: when the programmer created the chess program
that beat the world chess champion, was he anything other than a concourse of biochemical
reactions?

This is an interesting problem. Let us first look at computers. Here, however, we are
interested not in the chess program but in the person who wrote the chess program. The
significance of the computer in the consideration of that person will become clear as we
proceed.

Computers are programmed with algorithms: fixed sequential sets of instructions with
embedded logical rules. Programs[5] can be very complicated—witness the wonders of
science—but they all have a ‘fixed sequential sets of instructions with embedded logical rules’
character. Programs, moreover, must be conceived, designed, written, tested and corrected
in just the way that St Macrina has said concerning the design and production of primitive
robots.
Users of personal computers will have noticed the staleness that develops round a new
package or operating system after a time. Perhaps that is why there is always the urge to buy
the newest model of the computer or the newest edition of the software package or operating
system—to find something new or different, to return to the first challenge of the game. But
this staleness is inherent in the fixed logical nature of computer programs mentioned above,
no matter how complex the computer program might be.[6]

However, computers and computer programs are inseparable friends; the one needs the
other.

There have been some hopes of being able to mimic the more complex forms of human
reasoning or judgement by means of sophisticated computer programs; this is the so-called
project of expert systems or artificial intelligence. This would be a project in its final form to
create a computer program that would by itself, say, write a chess program to beat the world
chess champion. We understand that efforts of this type have not borne much fruit.

Here we begin to see the significance of the computer for a consideration of the person who
wrote the chess program: if we were able, even theoretically, to write a computer program
that mimicked the man who wrote the chess program, so that the computer would by itself
conceive, design, plan, execute, test and correct the chess program, then we would have
given an account of the mind (nous) of the chess programmer. It should be quite clear that it
is much easier to write a computer program to beat the world chess champion than it is to
write a computer program that would by itself design, write and test a computer program to
beat the world chess champion.

Now we have said that we want to address this question: was the human chess programmer
anything other than a concourse of biochemical reactions when he conceived, designed,
wrote and tested the chess program? St Macrina is saying: no; there is something over and
above the body or the biology of the man that conceives and brings to fruition the chess
program, and that is the intelligible mind (nous) of the chess programmer. St Gregory has
said: well, are we not all just concourses of biochemical reactions in our nervous systems
when we do such things, so that there is no such thing as the intelligible mind (nous)? We
ourselves are attempting to answer St Gregory’s question and are proceeding, for reasons
which will become clear below, from the point of view of artificial intelligence systems,
which, indeed, are not biological but logical. The project in the case of an artificial
intelligence system is to mimic the mind (nous) with a computer. We have pointed out that
all computers, including artificial intelligence systems, work by means of programs or
algorithms and we have also pointed out that artificial intelligence projects have not borne
much fruit.

Why should these projects not have borne much fruit?

In our view, the problem is in the nature of the algorithm and its relation to the mind—here
taken in a simple intuitive sense but with St Gregory’s and St Macrina’s analysis under
consideration.

It is evident that the human mind—or brain, even—does not work by algorithms: it is not
designed like any known computer. A program can be written to mimic the human mind—
witness the chess program that beat the world chess champion—but only in the sense of
mimicking the result of the human mind, not its mode of operation. This is, in fact, one of
the criticisms that have been directed against Turing’s Test, that it focuses on the result of
the human mind’s operation, not on that mode of operation itself: it is a behavioural
criterion of artificial intelligence.

However, historically, persons who have wanted to construct machines which would exhibit
artificial intelligence have taken the position that the human mind has an algorithmic
structure. That is, they take the position, as a matter of philosophy or assumption, that the
human mind is a very complicated algorithm. But algorithms have a specific logical
definition and structure. Hence, these persons are making the assertion that the human
mind works in the same way as an algorithm—that is, in exactly the same way as a computer
program.

In our own view, algorithms have a rather limited span of application. While we are here
unable easily to render precise the connection between algorithm and formal mathematical
system, let us turn to a certain topic in the foundations of mathematics to make our point
clear. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and A. N.
Whitehead (1861–1947) initiated a project to axiomatize arithmetic—to put arithmetic on the
same solid foundation as Euclidean geometry. This might be considered to be part of the
empiricist program. In 1931, however, Kurt Gödel (1906–1978), the Austrian logician,
constructed a proof that any such axiomatization of arithmetic would be imperfect.[7] This
proof, quite well known, stopped Russell’s and Whitehead’s project, and all other similar
projects, dead in its tracks. What are the implications of this?

We certainly are not experts, but it seems to us that the scope of a formal mathematical
system—such as an axiom system for arithmetic—is limited by Gödel’s Theorem, as the
above result is known. Moreover, there is a very close connection between the theory of
algorithms and Gödel’s Theorem. This is a very technical area, and the easiest thing to do is
to quote an article from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Recursive Function Theory’ by
Martin Davis:

Continuing to accept Church’s thesis,[8] the Kleene–Post form of Gödel’s theorem shows that Gödel’s
discovery of the necessary incompleteness of arithmetic cannot be vitiated by even the most radical
alteration in the accepted rules of proof; so long as we insist on the existence of an algorithm [i.e.
computer program] for checking the credentials of an alleged proof, there will always be a true sentence
of arithmetic undecidable by the rules of proof.[9]

This result hinges on the structure of the sets involved; they must have a certain structure for
any computer program or algorithm to be able to decide whether a candidate for
membership in the set is a member of the set or not; the set of all true statements in
arithmetic, under any axiomatization, fails to have this structure—this is Gödel’s Theorem.
We are here using Gödel’s Theorem as a result which speaks not so much about the
incompleteness of any formal axiomatization of arithmetic—which it does—but as a result
which speaks by corollary about a logical limitation of algorithms: they cannot in certain
cases decide whether a candidate element is a member of a set or not, in particular whether a
candidate sentence in an axiomatization of arithmetic is a member or not of the set of true
statements in that axiomatization of arithmetic. In this reading, while, given a particular
axiomatization of arithmetic, an algorithm (computer program) might be constructed which
could make the decision for some true sentences as to whether they were true or not, there
would be at least one true sentence, for every axiomatization and every algorithm, for which
the algorithm would be unable to decide. In general, even without reinterpreting Gödel’s
Theorem in the way we have suggested, all researchers in the field of the theory of algorithms
have accepted that Gödel’s Theorem implies that there are intrinsic logical limitations to the
power of an algorithm—without for all that agreeing just what the implications are for the
possibility of creating a machine that would exhibit artificial intelligence.

The question of the relation between an algorithm and the human mind can now be posed as
follows. Surely Gödel’s Theorem implies—philosophically, now, not mathematically—that the
human mind not only does not work by means of algorithms (computer programs) but that it
works by methods that surpass the logical potential of any algorithm?[10] Perhaps not as
methodically, nor, by comparison with modern computers, as fast, but certainly in greater
depth than any algorithm? Of course, this cannot be proven since we have no way to specify
just what the mind is and how it operates. In fact, St Macrina herself will speak below of the
unknowability of mind.

In our own view, the implication of the above is that algorithms—computer programs, and
hence computers—have logically a rather limited span of application. The project of artificial
intelligence—precisely the project to mimic the human mind by means of computer
programs—does not have any prospects of success. In our own view, the situation is
somewhat similar to constructing an airplane that mimics a bird. Certainly aeroplanes fly,
more or less as birds do; but they are not artificial birds: they are aeroplanes. The success of
aeronautical engineering does not consist in producing an airplane that mimics a bird, but in
using the principles of Newtonian mechanics and aerodynamics to produce useful aircraft,
according to whatever criteria of usefulness the designer might have. Similarly, the goal of
making computers do what they cannot (mimic the human mind, whether this is taken as
mimicking the external result of mind or as mimicking the mode of operation of the human
mind) is chimerical. Of course, this will not be accepted by students of computing who want
to make computers that think. However, while they have, and will have, piecemeal
qualitative results, the fundamental limitation on the logical power of algorithms that we
have just discussed will prevent them from obtaining a complete solution.

What does this have to do with molecular biology? The problem in molecular biology is this:
to complete the materialistic and mechanistic project (or paradigm), the molecular biologist
must reduce mind (nous)[11] to the molecular biology of the nervous system. This would
involve treating the molecular biology of the nervous system in a materialistic and
mechanistic way.
Hence, to complete the project of molecular biology, the molecular biologist must show that
the chess programmer does not have a mind (nous) in St Macrina’s formal sense even though
that chess programmer created the chess program. Recall that we commented that this was
the flaw in St Macrina’s argument. The molecular biologist has to provide a convincing
explanation of how the chess programmer’s molecular biology—his neural molecular biology
—created the chess program. This is the point that St Macrina did not respond to.

What we ourselves are saying is that those theoretical limitations of algorithms that we have
just described above render suspect the project to reduce the mind (nous) to molecular
biology in this way.

For there is an equivalence between the theory of algorithms and systems theory. This
equivalence is what allows one to use the discipline of systems analysis to design complex
computer systems that include more than one computer connected in a network.[12]

The point is this: The dominant paradigm in molecular biology is precisely systems theory,
so that the reduction of mind (nous) to molecular biology would be accomplished precisely
by means of a systems-theoretical representation of the molecular biological reactions that
produced the mental phenomena that interested one. But by the equivalence of the various
formulations of the theory of algorithms, such a systems representation would be equivalent
to some algorithm. But we have already seen the logical limitation of algorithms, and hence
of systems of the sort now being discussed, in the matter of axiomatizing arithmetic. In other
words, although algorithms can and have been written to beat the world chess champion at
chess, they could not be written to decide all true statements in any particular axiomatization
of arithmetic. Any systems representation of the molecular biological processes of the brain
that purported to explain mental processes whether in whole or in part would be subject to
the same logical limitations as algorithms are. Hence, we consider that any proposed systems
representation of the molecular biology of the mind (nous) would be logically limited to the
power of an algorithm, which appears to us to be less than the power of the human mind
(nous), although we concede that a student in the field might dispute this by alleging that the
human mind (nous) is just as limited as an algorithm. Of course, the question could never be
decided. On the one hand, we would have the representation produced by the molecular
biologist and, on the other hand, we would have St Macrina’s assertion that the mind (nous)
was an intelligible and formless thing, an autonomous self-mover, which was the agent that
worked through the molecular biology that was being represented, without for all that being
the molecular biology. One could only work with the systems representation of the molecular
biology of brain function; the connection of such a systems representation of brain function
to the existence or functioning of the human mind (nous)—including the question of whether
the human mind (nous) was limited or not to the logical power of an algorithm—would
remain problematical, as can be seen from the following:

Some efforts have been expended to model learning by neurobiological systems, by means of
computer programs that model neural networks. That is, the neurobiological system learns—
this is evident: you and I learn—and the scientist seeks to model on a computer the learning
that the neurobiological system has done using the concept of neural networks.

We do not know much about this. We do not know how the computer programs were
constructed. Hence, we do not know how much real progress—progress in constructing
models of neurobiological systems, which models learn in the same way that human beings
learn—has been made, or whether such striking results as there are, are not artefacts of the
algorithms—as if you or I were to throw sand into the air a hundred times, and each time
study the pattern on the ground: a few times we might find the face of your mother, more or
less. Were we to apply Turing’s Test to such a computer simulation today, the simulation
would most certainly fail. There is no evidence of the attainment by such systems of any
degree of human understanding that could be called adequate to fool a human questioner.

The project, however, has much in common with the project announced by Hume in his
theory of concept formation. In other words, the neural network modelled in the computer is
taken to model the mind[13] as defined by Hume; and the learning spoken of above is taken
to be the establishment of order within networks of computer-simulated neurons, which
order is established by the effect of simulated sensory inputs on computer modules that have
a partially random response to the simulated sensory input, and ultimately to each other, but
which can be frozen in a certain configuration. The result, it is hoped, mimics to a degree
concept formation and understanding, that is, intelligence. But this is the Humean
philosophical project used as a basis for the conceptualization of the experimental model.
That is, the experimental model is based on the Humean philosophical model which states
that concept-formation is a matter of the association of sense-perceptions, or, more
precisely, the association of ‘ideas’ which are the mental images of sense-perceptions,
passions or emotions. Hence, since Hume’s philosophical program dismissed all intelligible
conceptions—and even dismissed the existence of mind (nous) itself—, the experimental
model has embedded in it from the very beginning a reduced notion of what mental
phenomena are or might be. Hence our remark above that the connection between mind
(nous) and a systems representation of the molecular biology of the brain which purported to
explain mind (nous) would remain problematical: there would always be dispute about just
what that mind (nous) really was—its nature and its scope of operations—that the systems
representation of the molecular biology of the brain was purporting to explain. This dispute
would include the question of whether the human mind (nous) were limited to the logical
power of the algorithm. Moreover, there would be the problem of whether a priori the
molecular biologist, or even the computer specialist modelling the mind with neural
networks, had eliminated from the definition of mind aspects of human life that we ourselves
would consider to be intrinsically human mental activities, such as prayer.

An explanation of why the chess programmer wrote the chess program the way he did and
with the judgements he made has to be given by the molecular biologist. This is not the same
thing as saying that the mind (nous) has no connection to biology. St Macrina is clear that
the mind (nous) works through the body; and that if the body is damaged, then the mind
(nous) cannot express itself, precisely where the damage prevents it. Nor is it to deny the
architecture that exists in the nervous system.

The problem of course is this: DNA does not think. Cortisone—a randomly chosen hormone
—does not think. ATP—a randomly chosen organic molecule important in the molecular
biology of the cell—does not think. You and I think. How do we get from the one to the
other? Moreover, molecular biological systems are chemical systems: they are deterministic
systems within the constraints of random occurrences at various levels of analysis. Within
the constraints of a stochastic system,[14] they do not choose, love, contemplate God or any
such thing. Hence, it is hard to explain purposeful human behaviour by means of chemical
reactions. This is the self-movedness of the soul that St Macrina takes from Plato. That is
why St Macrina could refute the notion that the operations of mind (nous) were due to the
natural properties of the elements within the body by an argument that the primitive robots
of her day did not assemble themselves spontaneously and operate spontaneously, but
through human art. We ourselves think that St Macrina’s argument is flawed as it stands. We
have tried to improve it.
One species of bird builds its nest in one way, and, if the nest is damaged, repairs it
according to the model of the species. Can molecular biology explain this? We are humans;
our behaviour is much more complex. We build buildings, write poems, build robots, do
philosophy, do physics, write and play music—do many things that seem to be beyond mere
chemical reactions. It is these things that St Macrina is saying show the existence of mind
(nous), because they require comprehension, understanding, planning, art, systematic
execution in materials.

We have here gone somewhat further than St Macrina and addressed the point: can the mind
(nous) which comprehends, plans and executes in materials through the agency of the body
be reduced to the molecular biology of the brain? We have suggested that the inherent logical
limitation of the algorithm is such as to call into question the project to reduce mind (nous)
to molecular biological reactions, since the molecular biological reduction, according to the
current paradigm of molecular biology, would involve a systems representation of that
molecular biology which would be logically and mathematically equivalent to an algorithm.
But, in fact, the program to reduce mind (nous) to molecular biology is required by the
intrinsic philosophical orientation of the molecular biologist today—by the materialistic and
mechanistic paradigm that we spoke of earlier.

There is a further fundamental conceptual problem: To return to the chess program, given
the nature of chess, the computer program can look ahead many, many moves—and if the
machine that runs the program is fast and has much memory, it can give its answer without
making you wait. The more moves the program is programmed to look ahead, the better its
answer. Someone, however, once asked a chess master ‘How many moves ahead do you
look?’ ‘One, but it’s the right one,’ he replied. A facetious reply but one which conceals a
truth: the chess master is not a man whose mind is a bigger computer than the minds of all
his opponents or a man whose mind looks ahead more moves than all his opponents, but a
man whose mind understands the chess game better than all his opponents: the position, the
right move—although he certainly may look ahead a number of moves. It is as St Macrina has
said in her own examples: the chess master has a conception (ennoia) in his mind (nous).

With much equipment, many programmers and much, much patience, it might be possible
to construct a computer system that passed Turing’s Test by means of a computer that
operated on a very big algorithm or computer program. But the machine would not be alive;
it would not think; merely much human ingenuity would have gone into anticipating the
questions that might be put and establishing what answers to give. This is the problem with a
behavioural criterion of artificial intelligence: the behaviour can be faked by means of human
ingenuity on the part of the computer programmers. And this was precisely St Macrina’s
point in the Fourth Century: these things do not happen by themselves; much human
ingenuity goes into the conception, design and implementation of even the most simple
‘artificial intelligence’ system—which is precisely what the primitive robot was that she and
her brother were discussing in the Fourth Century. Even so, the results of work in artificial
intelligence systems have been disappointing. Even if they were encouraging, however, the
very nature of the algorithm makes the algorithm, the computer program, inadequate—on
the basis of Gödel’s Theorem and the close connection between it and the theory of
algorithms—to turn the machine into a mathematician, say, that can reliably decide
theorems in arithmetic.

Molecular biological systems, when they are represented by systems-theoretic models, are
intrinsically able to be represented in a computer by an algorithm; this is the equivalence of
the various formulations of the theory of computing, of which two formulations are systems
theory and the theory of algorithms. Any attempt to reduce mind to a systems-theoretic
representation in molecular biology will founder on the intrinsic theoretical limitation of the
algorithm. For if such a project were to be able to succeed, then necessarily mind would be
representable by an algorithm, and that would be to imply that all human mental
phenomena were reducible to algorithms. There would be the fundamental philosophical
problem, however, whether the reduction had not been achieved at the cost of eliminating
some mental phenomena—such as prayer—as being unreal or otherwise illusory. In other
words, there is the danger in such projects of an insistence a priori that only mental
phenomena that can be represented by algorithms are genuine mental phenomena and of a
refusal a priori to accept other mental phenomena, such as prayer, as genuine human
mental phenomena. This approach is already foreshadowed in Hume’s own rejection of
miracles as spurious.

Let us take a final example: I can write an algorithm to play jazz. If I am patient, I can gather
many musicologists, systems analysts, computer programmers and electronics engineers,
and I can get them to program a computer to play every known piece of jazz ever played. I
might even design some ‘spontaneous’ algorithms for improvisational pieces, using
randomizing functions in the algorithms. To the layman and even to the experienced
musician it might sound like jazz. To the man who programmed it, however, it would simply
be a computer program. Jazz is a very long way from all that. When the nightingale sings, is
it just a machine?

St Gregory has his own response:

[1] This certainly would be considered sound in our own age: the proposition of Albert Einstein, e = mc 2, establishes not
only the equivalence of all matter but also its equivalence with energy; the findings of particle physics certainly do not
dispute the notion that all matter is the same sort of thing.

[2] In the broad Aristotelian sense.

[3] See Copleston Volume I, p. 415.

[4] See http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.1.html. The author makes the following remarks which
put the victory of the computer over the world chess champion into context:

‘It turns out that the Japanese board game “go” will not succumb to such brute force methods—there are simply too
many possible moves for even the most powerful supercomputer imagined to ever examine. Instead, “real” AI [artificial
intelligence] will be needed—intelligence based on pattern recognition, “insight” and strategy. Indeed, for those of us
who work in pattern recognition, machine learning, or various fields allied with artificial intelligence, it is the
weaknesses of Deep Blue [i.e. the computer that beat the world chess champion] that are the most interesting. How
should we program computers to recognize and understand the style of their opponent’s play and adapt accordingly?
How should we program the machine to distinguish the most promising lines of attack from the ones that are not likely
to pay off? How do we program machines to make complex plans? Whereas there are some aspects of the Deep Blue
system that employ crude versions of methods we know are important in human intelligence (in particular when scoring
the quality of a position), their weaknesses are compensated by the brute force search through possible moves.

‘It must be emphasized, too, that even if such subtle and complicated techniques of pattern recognition, reasoning and
so forth are ultimately achieved in chess, there would still remain an enormous gulf between their use in chess and in
other general aspects of intelligence, for instance, in planning a story or recognizing a scene. For these, we may have to
duplicate the human, at least at some level of abstraction.’

[5] ‘Program’ and ‘algorithm’ are synonymous.

[6] One imagines that introducing a stochastic element—a range of outcomes according to a probability density function
—might to an extent cure this problem of staleness. The computer manufacturer would arrange that the operating
system would behave just a little differently each time a command were entered, on the basis of the probability functions
mentioned. In cases where the results were not disastrous, they would be interesting—and challenging—to the user of
the computer.

[7] We use the informal and imprecise word ‘imperfect’ to avoid a formal statement of incompleteness.

[8] This is the hypothesis that any one of the many equivalent formulations of the theory of algorithms is in fact
adequate to cover any intuitive notion of ‘mechanical procedure’ as it might be encountered in practical life.

[9] Encyclopedia Vol. 7, p. 94.

[10] This was evidently Gödel’s own view.

[11] Now and henceforth taken in St Gregory’s and St Macrina’s formal sense.

[12] Here and below, ‘systems theory’ is taken not as ‘theory of formal mathematical systems’—this was Russell’s and
Whitehead’s project for arithmetic—but as one formulation of the theory of algorithms useful for the design of complex
computer systems. We must mention in addition that we do not know what happens when one introduces probability
functions into the systems representation: a systems representation without probability functions is equivalent to an
algorithm, but we are not aware of any work on, or results concerning, systems representations or even algorithms
which contain a probabilistic element. Let us therefore restrict the argument to a systems representation of the
molecular biology of the chess programmer which is ‘classical’—which does not use probability functions in its
formulation.

[13] Common acceptation.

[14] The random element.

Chapter I -- 16
I myself say, then, that this thing is the way you say: that which does not appear
sensibly is not the same thing as that which appears sensibly; but, truly, I do not
see in this definition that which is being sought.

St Gregory is here agreeing with St Macrina but moving on to the next issue. ‘That which
does not appear sensibly’ is the immaterial and sensibly inapprehensible mind (nous), the
intelligible mind (nous). St Gregory is conceding that that intelligible mind is different from
a sensible object (‘that which appears sensibly’). He is saying, however, that this account of
the mind (nous) does not really explain just what mind (nous) is. He continues:

For it is not yet evident to me what in the world it is necessary to think that
thing is which does not appear—but that it is not a material sort of thing, I have
learned from the definition, not yet knowing whatever it is appropriate to say
concerning it. And I certainly was wanting to learn this: not what the mind
(nous) is not, but just what it is.

She then said: Many things, and concerning many things, we learn in this way:
in saying that something is not this thing here, interpreting the very being of
what is sought, whatever thing it is at all. For saying ‘not wicked’ man we have
set before the mind the ‘good’ man, and calling someone ‘unmanly’ we have
made known the ‘cowardly’ man; and in these matters many things are to be
said in a similar way by means of which we take up the [morally] better sense
from the negation of the [morally] wicked senses; or, in the other direction, we
are turned in our suppositions to the [morally] worse sense, exhibiting the
[morally] wicked sense by the deprivation of the [morally] good senses.

Therefore, having thus considered the present definition, one would not fail to
reach the required conception (ennoia) regarding that which is sought. It is
sought what mind (nous) must be thought to be according to its very substance.
Therefore, he who on the one hand, by means of the operation which is
manifested in us by it, does not doubt that this thing exists concerning which is
the definition, but who wishes on the other hand to know what it is, would
adequately find an answer in learning that this thing is not something that the
sense comprehends, not colour, not shape, not hardness, not weight, not
quantity, not something in three dimensions, not position in a place, neither
any one of those things which in any way at all are comprehended in regard to
matter, if, indeed, there is any quality other than these [which I have listed].

Where have we arrived? St Macrina has taken the position that the existence of the mind
(nous) has been proved by its operations—the discussion has moved from a discussion of
soul (psuche) to a consideration of the existence of mind (nous). Now the question is: well,
what is mind (nous)? St Macrina proceeds apophatically. Indeed, she introduces the
apophatic method, and very gently. The apophatic method is the method of negations, and is
usually used in regard to God. It is the method of approaching what something is by stating
what it is not. That the apophatic method is being used for the mind (nous) is relevant, for
we shall see that the mind (nous) is the image of God.[1]

St Macrina has posited that the mind (nous) is an immaterial substance. Substances have
qualities inhering in them; this is Aristotle’s metaphysics. What St Macrina is doing is
negating all sensible qualities, that is, all qualities that a sensible substance might have
inhering in it. Sensible substances are material; intelligible substances are immaterial.
Hence, intelligible substances have no sensible qualities. St Macrina has listed the most
obvious sensible qualities—which are not precisely a repetition of Aristotle’s categories—
negated them, and then said: and I negate every other possible sensible quality, if in fact
there should be one. The mind (nous) cannot be apprehended by the senses. By extension,
neither can the mind (nous) be apprehended by scientific instruments. The mind (nous) is
apprehended, just as God is, by the mind’s (nous’) operations in nature. That is, the mind
(nous) is apprehended by its operations in the sensible world, which operations it carries out
through the instrumentality of the body.

What is important to grasp is that the existence of mind (nous) is shown, in St Macrina’s
argument, by its operations (energeies). What this means is that the existence of mind
(nous) is manifested by those aspects of human behaviour that we refer to in either
epistemological or ethical discourse. These are concepts of person, agent, act, action,
responsibility, love, knowledge, reason, and so on. These things St Macrina takes to be
neither manifestations of the sensible aspect of the person—the sensible elements of the
body subject to cause and effect—nor things which can be reduced to those sensible elements
and their causes and effects, nor merely a matter of how men use epistemological or ethical
concepts in their ordinary language: for St Macrina, these things and others like them ‘point’
to the immaterial mind (nous) whose operations these things are.

Moreover, for St Macrina the mind (nous) is itself not subject to sensible predication, it itself
not being sensible at all. Hence, the mind (nous) does not belong to the sensible order of the
world. It is not subject to the laws of cause and effect at all; it is subject to the ‘laws’ of
epistemological and ethical discourse, among other laws: the ‘laws’ of epistemological and
ethical discourse manifest the nature of the mind (nous).

St Gregory now interrupts.

I said in the middle of her detailed account: I do not know how it is, all these
things being abstracted from the definition, that that which is being sought [the
mind (nous)] is not utterly destroyed along with them.

That is, by negating all sensible attributes of the substance called mind (nous), have you not
negated the substance of mind (nous) too?

For according to my own conception (ennoia), when the comprehensive

curiosity is attached to something without these things, it does not yet see. For
everywhere in the investigation of existent things, handling by means of the
examining intellect that which is sought, we always touch one of those things
spoken, finding either colour or shape or quantity or some other of the things
now enumerated by you, just like some blind men being led by the hand
towards the door by means of the walls. When none of these things should be
stated to be, we are brought round from meanness of soul not to deem that
which is being considered to be anything at all.

This is an important objection. It is the final statement by St Gregory of the empiricist

rejection of intelligibles. First let us note that the phrase ‘comprehensive curiosity’ means
‘attention of mind’ without necessarily implying ‘by means of the senses’. ‘When we consider
an object’ might be a translation of the phrase’s meaning. What St Gregory is saying—
obviously a literary device—is this: When we abstract away the sensible qualities of a
substance, what is left? Moreover, when we mentally consider a substance, we are led to a
comprehension of its nature by one or another sensible quality. When the object under
consideration has no sensible qualities at all, we are led round to the point of knowing
nothing about it and to thinking that it does not even exist. We think that those readers who
do not accept the existence of mind (nous) or soul (psuche) as immaterial substances would
agree with this objection.

We will find in Volume II, and even in Chapter III, below, that Evagrius Pontikos in his
ascetical psychology deals explicitly with how sensible and intelligible objects or substances
are cognized by the mind (nous). This is important for a clear understanding of how God is
known by the mind (nous) of the mystic or contemplative.

She, then, complaining bitterly in the middle of the argument, said: Away with
this eccentricity!

Let us also interrupt. We want to return to the topic of systems-theoretic representations in

molecular biology. We do not wish to suggest that systems-theoretic models are invalid. We
ourselves have proposed a theoretical model, developmentally based and systems oriented,
for genetic theory in The Genetic Program, A Systems Approach.[2] However, we made our
proposal with two reservations: First, such models are contingent—always partially true as
man-made—and always used instrumentally in the comprehension of the reality that is
modelled—there, molecular genetics. Such models may give very good answers over a certain
domain of data, otherwise why would they be constructed? Second, in the specific case of the
human, such molecular biological models address only the sensible substrate; they do not
account for the mind (nous) or soul (psuche). Hence, we are further suggesting that the
domain of such models is limited to the sensible and cannot as sensible models approach the
non-sensible, the intelligible. For the intelligible operates by different ‘rules’. One finds hints
of this in discussions of ethical language that view ethical language as being a different sort
of discourse than language concerning inanimate objects, machines, plants and animals.
Those discussions consider that concepts such as agent, person, act, action, and so on, are
introduced into ethical discourse which are not the sorts of concepts with which we speak of
the non-human things just listed, except perhaps by extension. We ourselves are saying that
this feature of ethical language is strongly correlated to the fact that humans are in fact
agents or persons who act purposefully, and we view this aspect of humans as deriving from
their having a soul (psuche) or mind (nous), which soul (psuche) or mind (nous) is
intelligible and which does not belong to the sensible world of cause and effect. While this
view of humans has not been in fashion in Anglo-American philosophy since Hume, we think
that it is necessitated not only by theology, but also by the very great difficulties that arise in
the empiricist tradition concerning treating the human as a person or agent who acts
purposefully when the initial model of the person (the philosophical psychology of the
person) is materialistic and mechanistic, even should the model be modified in some slight
ways. For, in the empiricist tradition, the assumption is that only sensible things exist—
Locke is an exception—, that the whole man is sensible, and that the rules that apply to man
are those that apply to sensible objects; the result is what we have called the impoverished
philosophical psychology of Hume. In general, in a philosophical tradition which recognizes
the existence only of sensible things, there will be always a tendency to treat man as one
natural phenomenon among the many, as subject to an explanation according to cause and
effect. However, in our view, since the soul (psuche) or mind (nous) is intelligible, it belongs
to a different order of existence; it obeys different ‘rules’ and must be discussed with a
different sort of discourse from talk about sensible objects: person, agent, act, action and so
on. Of course, the empiricist program rejects the introduction of such intelligible things as
the soul, establishing as a philosophical principle that only sensible things exist and that if
something is not sensible, then it does not exist. Hence, our remarks about the problematical
nature of a hypothetical systems-theoretic representation of the molecular biology of mind
(nous): On the one hand, just what the mind (nous) is would continue to be disputed; and so
perforce would the possibility of its being modelled in its actual mode of operation by a
system that was logically limited to the power of the algorithm. As we have remarked,
however, given a certain range of behaviours specified in advance, it might be conceptually
‘easy’, although difficult, perhaps, in time, money and talent, to mimic those behaviours with
an algorithm that would be designed to mimic just those behaviours and nothing more. This
was the import of our example of a computer that played jazz: that particular human
behaviour could be mimicked relatively ‘easily’ without regard to the question of how it is
that humans actually compose and play jazz.

However, in the case of mystical experience, the empiricist tradition makes it impossible to
discuss the experience except in one of the ways we have already indicated—that is, in terms
of a humanistic or similar psychology that reduces mystical experience to alterations of the
normal biochemical functioning of the brain and nervous system. The empiricist
philosophical tradition rejected the existence of God and the existence of intelligibles and it
cannot form the basis of a serious analysis of mysticism, although it might form the basis of a
‘scientific’ study of mysticism that applied a cause and effect model to reduce mysticism to
‘psychology’ or ‘behaviourism’ or modifications of the molecular biology of the brain or
something similar. This is the great problem with authors, and persons in general, who,
dissatisfied with the barrenness of the empiricist world-view, turn to mysticism: they are
crippled by the empiricist world-view from conceptualizing properly the mysticism in a
religious tradition, and reduce it to something that is half-mystical and half-empiricist. They
often turn to occultism in their naïveté. —But this is where St Macrina has interrupted
angrily. Let us continue:

To what limit will this paltry and vulgar judgement concerning those things that
exist destroy! For if there were taken out of the existent everything that is not
recognized by sense, he who says this would not even confess the very Power
overseeing all things and encompassing all things, but being taught the bodiless
and the formless properties of the Divine Nature, he would reckon, from such a
chain of reasoning as this, that that Power did not exist at all!

Which is what empiricists and their descendants do.

If, then, there [i.e. in the application of the apophatic method to God himself],
the assertion that these things are not

That is: ‘If in the application of the apophatic method to God, the assertion that no sensible
quality can be attributed to God’—

does not become a legal objection to God’s existence, how is the human mind
(nous) squeezed out of that which exists, being expended together in the
removal of the bodily properties?

The logic is this: We accept that God exists despite the application of the apophatic method,
which negates of God all sensible qualities. How is it, then, that the human mind (nous) is
lost to us from existence when we similarly apply the apophatic method to negate of the
mind (nous) all sensible or bodily qualities? Later, St Macrina will posit that it is the mind
(nous)—obviously with a much broader meaning than is given to ‘mind’ in the Anglo-
American philosophical tradition—that is the image of God in man. Hence, given that the
mind (nous), apprehended apophatically, is the image of God, who also is apprehended
apophatically, a full analogy is made between image and Prototype.

St Gregory has a rather tart answer:

I said: Therefore, by means of this chain of reasoning, from one absurd thing
we succeed to another absurd thing. For our logic has come round to consider
even our own mind (nous) to be identical to the Divine Nature, if, indeed, each
is conceived through the exclusion of those things which are found by means of
the senses.

Although this has the air of a literary device, it is very important for the objection—that the
apophatic method applied both to God and to mind (nous) leads to the result that mind
(nous) and God are of the same nature—to be considered and disposed of.

The teacher said: Do not say this—for this word is impious—but as you have
been taught by the divine voice, say that this is similar to that.

Does this mean: As you have been taught by Scripture, say that the mind (nous)[3] is similar
to God? Or does it mean: Whatever you have been taught by Scripture about God—his
attributes—say that the mind (nous) has similar attributes? We prefer the second reading,
but the first may very well be the correct one. On either reading, but especially on the second,
this passage is very important for it begins to give full force to the theological doctrine that
the mind (nous) or soul (psuche) is the image of God. Moreover, epistemologically, the
possibility of the mystic to know God is founded on this analogy of image and Prototype.

St Macrina continues with a very important exposition of the doctrine of the mind (nous) or
soul (psuche) as the image of God:
For that which has come to be according to the image (kat’ eikona), completely
has the similarity, by means of all things, to the Archetype: mental (noeran) to
mental (noerou), bodiless to bodiless, completely freed of all volume just as he
is, and escaping from all dimensional measurement similarly to him, being
other, however, than he is according to the property of the nature, for the mind
(nous) would not still be an image (eikona) if it were identical to him in
everything; but in those things that he is viewed in his uncreated nature, in
those same things the created nature shows this.

Let us take this passage slowly because of its extremely great significance.

The first assertion is that the image (eikona) has a complete similarity to the Archetype,
mind (nous) to God. This of course is founded on the Genesis account of the creation of man:

And God said, Let us make man according to our image and likeness; and let
them rule over the fish of the seas and the birds of Heaven and the animals and
the whole earth and all the creeping creatures that creep upon the earth. And
God made the man; in the image of God he made him; male and female he made
them.[4]

St Macrina lists these qualities in which the mind (nous) has a complete similarity to its
Archetype, God: ‘mental’ (noeros), ‘bodiless’, ‘freed of all volume’, ‘escaping from all
dimensional measurement’. Let us take each of these in turn. Let us first note, however, that
the ‘similarity’ that St Macrina is positing is actually an identity: both the mind (nous) and
God are ‘mental’; both are ‘bodiless’; both are ‘freed of volume’; both escape ‘all dimensional
measurement’. In other words, St Macrina’s ‘similar’ must not be taken in the sense that the
mind (nous) merely resembles God, but in the sense that the mind (nous) has exactly the
same attributes as God save one: the mind (nous) is created whereas God is uncreated.

As we have already remarked, the word we have translated ‘mental (noeros)’ etymologically
means ‘possessing mind’. As an epithet it is here used of God and of mind (nous); it is used
elsewhere of angels and demons. It could well be translated ‘spiritual’. It might be considered
to include the idea of having consciousness or personhood. It is what makes a man a
purposeful actor in the world. It is what grants him ethical responsibility. It is what gives him
the capacity to know God. It is what gives him the capacity to reason. It is sometimes used
instead of, or replaced by, ‘logiko’, a Greek word that means ‘possessing reason’ or
‘possessing speech’. Animals, plants and rocks do not have mind (nous); they are therefore
not ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual’; by the analogy with ‘logiko’, they are considered not to have reason
or speech. Animals are restricted to sense-perception; plants to vegetative life; rocks to mere
existence.[5] Hence, we can here conclude that when the notion of ‘having consciousness’ is
introduced in regard to mind (nous), it means, inter alia, ‘having spiritual consciousness’ or
‘being able to cognize non-sensible realities’. It does not mean merely ‘existent’, merely
‘being alive’ or merely ‘being sentient, having sense-perception’.

We have seen previously that ‘bodiless’ means ‘non-sensible’ or ‘immaterial’ and that it is
usually predicated of God, the angels and demons. Men have a body, but they also have a
mind (nous) which is bodiless. In the commentary, we have often used ‘intelligible (noetos)’
in preference to ‘bodiless’.

Readers wondering about the inclusion of demons here should recall that in Christian
theology, demons are fallen angels. They have not lost the characteristics such as ‘possessing
mind (noeros)’ and ‘being bodiless’ that they had before they fell. Hence God, angels
(including those which have fallen, demons), and men ‘possess mind’ and the first three are
in themselves bodiless, while man’s mind (nous) is bodiless.

‘Freed of all volume’ means that we cannot measure the volume of the mind (nous). It has no
volume, although it would be better to say that it is free of the concept of volume. Today, we
would say that the mind (nous) has no mass or that the concept of mass is irrelevant to
discussions of the nature of the mind (nous).

‘Escaping from all dimensional measurement’ means that the mind (nous) does not have
spatial extension. It is recognized by its operations (energeies). St Macrina is saying that the
mind (nous) of man escapes from all dimensional measurement, just as God himself does.

Now St Macrina inserts an important qualification: the mind (nous) and God are different
according to the property of the nature: the similarities that mind (nous) has to God are
complete except that God is uncreated and the mind (nous) created. As St Gregory points out
in On the Making of Man,[6] unless the image and the Archetype are completely alike, they
do not bear the relation of image and Archetype. But unless they differ in something, they
are not image and Archetype; they are the same thing. Hence, to preserve these two
necessary aspects of the relation of image (mind or nous) to Archetype (God), St Macrina
asserts that mind (nous) is similar to God in everything, with the sole exception that mind
(nous) is created while God is uncreated.[7] Moreover, ‘similar’ is here not to be taken in the
sense of ‘resembles’ but in the sense of ‘possessing exactly the same attribute’.[8]

What is being said with these words? We have reached the foundation of Orthodox
anthropology: man is created ‘according to our image and likeness’. Man is created in the
image of God. This image resides in the mind (nous) or soul (psuche) of each man. This
image is a complete likeness except in this, that man is created and God, the Archetype, is
uncreated. We can now see the dignity of man, a dignity that surpasses comprehension.
Created in the image and likeness of God, by God, he has been granted rule ‘over the fish of
the seas and the birds of Heaven and the animals and the whole earth and all the creeping
creatures that creep upon the earth’. There is nothing—nothing at all—which shares this
dignity.

What can we say about this? The dignity of man is unsurpassable. Man is not just one life-
form among the many. He is not simply an evolved life form. He is not simply one more
species of animal, a species with a fortuitously large brain. His dignity rests not on the size of
his brain case, but on his mind (nous) or soul (psuche), created in the image and likeness of
God. God, his Lord, has granted man dominion—rule—over all his material creation. What
can surpass such a dignity as the dignity that a man has?

Moreover, man’s spiritual potential rests on this similarity between man’s mind (nous) and
God himself. Let us see how St Macrina herself puts it:

And as indeed often in a small piece of glass, when it should happen to lie
towards the ray [of the sun], the whole disk of the sun is seen in it, not
appearing in it in the same size, but as the smallness of the piece holds the
appearance of the [solar] disk, thus in the smallness of our own nature, the
images (eikones) of those inexpressible properties of the Divinity shine out, so
that, by means of these things, the reason, being led by the hand, neither should
fall from the understanding with regard to the substance of the mind, the bodily
property having been cleared away in the examination of the subject for
discussion, nor again should lead the small and perishable nature to equality
with the unseen and imperishable nature, but should deem the substance [of
the mind] to be intelligible (noeten) since it is the image (eikona) of an
intelligible (noeten) substance [i.e. God], truly, however, without calling the
image (eikona) the same thing as the Archetype.

Let us first paraphrase this difficult passage. Just as a small piece of glass, when it lies
towards the rays of the sun, reflects a complete but small image of the solar disk, so our own
human nature reflects the inexpressible properties of the Divine Nature. Our reason, then,
being led by the hand from these considerations, should not fall away from its understanding
of the substance of the mind (nous), that it is not a sensible thing, sensible qualities having
been eliminated by the consideration of the subject at hand, but our reason also should not
construe the small and perishable nature of the mind (nous) to be equal to the unseen and
imperishable nature of God. Rather, our reason should deem the substance of the mind
(nous) to be intelligible (noeten), since the mind (nous) is the image (eikona) of an
intelligible (noeten) substance, God—without, for all that, our reason calling the image
(eikona) the same thing as the Archetype.

Let us now analyse this. The image of the reflection of the sun (God) in the small piece of
glass (the human mind or soul) is very important, especially because St Macrina qualifies
this reflection as being of the properties of God. That is, we say of God, ‘God is love.’ Then
the reflection of God in the human mind (nous) or soul (psuche) is seen in the divine love
that the person has and manifests. Similarly for ‘God is merciful, long-suffering, forgiving’:
the reflection of God in the human mind (nous) or soul (psuche) is seen in those very
qualities of the human person. It will not be lost on the reader that when viewed in the
human person, these things are called virtues. Moreover, St Macrina’s image conveys the
idea that the rays of the sun are what are reflected in the glass. That is, her image conveys the
idea that the virtues of the human person are reflections of the same properties of the Divine
Nature itself. We see here a beginning of a theology of virtue. The reader may recall that we
earlier announced that we would see a sense for the term ‘virtue’ much deeper than a mere
adherence to rules. Here is the beginning of that deeper understanding of what human virtue
is. There are further aspects of this deeper understanding of human virtue, however, and we
shall encounter them as we proceed. Moreover, we shall see in Volume III that St Hesychios
uses the image of the small piece of glass and the rays of the sun to portray the way in which
the Hesychast sees God. As indeed does St Paul: ‘For now we see by means of a mirror in a
riddle; then, however, face to face; now I know in part, then, however, I shall look upon even
as I was looked upon.’[9] However, let us remain with St Gregory and his sister for now.

The next point that St Macrina makes is the smallness of the image of the sun in the piece of
glass. This is important for the doctrine of divinization (theosis), the doctrine of the
attainment by the human person to a likeness to God, the kath’ homoiosin. We do not
become God—we cannot, since intrinsically the mind (nous) is of a different nature from
God, being created whereas God is uncreated. But even when the glass is completely clean—
we will learn in Evagrius in Volume II what that means—the image is much smaller than the
prototype, the sun, according to the size of the piece of glass. We are created and we cannot
manifest the fullness of the Divinity even in the sense of an image: none of us is of the stature
of God. Compared to God, we are very small, and the image we present of God, however
perfect it might be, is itself much smaller than the Reality that is God. We cannot become
God, nor, if we were to become perfect images of God, would we have the stature of God. We
are small and finite and the image we present is intrinsically small and finite, however
perfect it might be.

St Macrina continues that by means of the reflection of the properties of God in us, we are
led by consideration of the matter to see that the mind (nous) is not bodily or material, but
also to see that the mind (nous) is not equal to God: we are small and perishable; God is
unseen and imperishable. So on the one hand both the mind and God are intelligible (i.e. not
sensible but apprehended by their operations in nature), but on the other hand they are not
the same thing: the mind (nous) remains an image of God, not the same thing, or of the same
nature, or of the same substance. St Macrina continues:

Therefore, just as through the unspeakable wisdom of God which appears in all
things we do not doubt that the Divine Nature and power are in all existent
things, so that all things remain in existence—if, however, one should require a
definition of the [Divine] Nature, the substance of God is exceedingly far distant
from each of the things in creation which are manifested and apprehended by
thought, but nonetheless that which stands apart in respect of nature [i.e. God]
is confessed to be in these things—thus there is nothing unbelievable that the
substance of the soul, being some other sort of thing in itself, whatever that
might ever be guessed to be, is also not prevented from existing, although those
elemental things that are seen in the world do not occur to it according to the
definition of its nature.

This difficult passage needs explication. St Macrina’s first point is a repetition of her own and
St Paul’s doctrine of God’s self-revelation in nature by means of his wisdom. We have already
discussed this: we perceive in creation the unspeakable wisdom of God that appears in all
things, and from that we are led to grasp that God upholds all creation by his ‘Divine Nature
and power’, so that all things remain in existence. Evagrius will make use of this doctrine in
his theory of asceticism and contemplation; it is the basis of his ‘second natural
contemplation’, which we discuss in Volume II and to a certain extent in Chapter III, below.
St Macrina then makes a very important parenthetical remark. She says: If you demand,
however, a definition of the Divine Nature, that Divine Nature is exceedingly far distant from
anything that is manifested (i.e. sensible) or apprehended by thought (i.e. intelligible) in
creation. Nonetheless, that Divine Nature, completely sundered from all things in creation
according to the nature of its substance, is confessed to be in all things upholding them. That
is, the Divine Nature, being uncreated, is completely different from all created things but
that completely different Divine Nature is nonetheless in all created things, upholding them.
This is the fundamental Christian understanding of the Divine Nature. Leaving her
parenthetical remark, St Macrina then says, in a very different statement: In the same way,
then, there is nothing unbelievable about the existence of the substance of the soul (psuche),
whatever that might be guessed to be, even though those elemental things which are seen in
the world do not occur to it. St Macrina’s use of the phrase ‘whatever that might ever be
guessed to be’ concerning the substance or essence of the soul indicates that for her the
substance or essence of the soul is unknowable in itself. That it exists can be inferred from its
operations, but the fact that all possible sensible predicates are denied to it means that it
cannot be known in the way that a sensible object can be known. We take the ambiguous
expression ‘elemental things’ to mean ‘sensible qualities’, especially given St Macrina’s use of
the word ‘occur’, which in the Greek is connected etymologically to the Aristotelian word
‘accident’, defined as a quality which inheres in a particular substance not necessarily but
sometimes. The Nineteenth Century translator, Moore, refers ‘elemental things’ to the
elements themselves, construing the passage to say that the mind (nous) has nothing to do
with the elements.[10] Surely the thought underlying the passage is this: God is not a
sensible being, but we believe in him through his operations. Similarly, the mind (nous) is
not a substance with sensible qualities, but there is nothing unbelievable in its existing,
whatever its substance—not subject to sensible predication—might ever be guessed to be.

For, as has already been said, not even in regard to living bodies, in which the
hypostasis is from the mixing together of the elements, is there in the simple
and formless substance of the soul (psuche) any communion with the bodily
grossness as regards the substance [of the soul], but it is not doubted, however,
that the enlivening operation (energeia) of the soul is in these elements, the
soul being mixed up [with the elements of the body] by a certain principle
greater than human understanding.

Let us paraphrase this extremely important passage concerning the relation between soul
and body. In living bodies, the hypostasis of the body—the constitution, the identity, the
being as a whole, the system as composed of system components—is from the mixing
together of the elements. That is, the identity of a living body is the molecular biology of that
living body pure and simple. Moreover, with regard to the substance of the soul, the simple
and formless essence of the soul, there is no communion at all between the soul and the
grossness of the body: the substance or essence of the soul has no connection whatsoever
with the molecular biology of the body whose soul it is. Despite that, it is not to be doubted
that the enlivening operation of the soul is in those elements of the body, those molecular
biological compounds, the soul being mixed up with those elements of the body, those
molecular biological compounds, by a certain principle greater than human understanding.

We understand this passage to say that the substance or essence of the soul has no
connection with the molecular biology of the body. The molecular biology of the living body
does not determine the essence or substance of the human soul. We encountered this
problem earlier when we discussed whether the soul was the DNA or the information content
of the DNA. It is not. There is no connection at all—as concerns the substance or essence of
the soul—between the soul and the molecular biology of the body. However, for all that, we
do not doubt that the enlivening operation (energeia) of the soul is in the molecular biology
of the body, being mixed up with it by a certain principle greater than human understanding.
In other words, although the essence or substance of the soul has no connection at all with
the molecular biology of the body, the soul enlivens the body by a principle greater than
human understanding—by means of an operation (energeia) of the soul. Recall that we
began with the notion that the soul had something to do with the liveliness of the person
alive, and saw that the Ancients were struck by the irreducible difference between the living
and the dead, and that they ascribed this difference to the presence or absence of something
they called the soul. We have now arrived at a fuller understanding of that concept. The soul
is intelligible and has no connection according to its essence with the living body; however, it
enlivens, by an operation (energeia) that it possesses, that living body in the very matrix, let
us say, of that living body’s molecular biology. As we have pointed out, this enlivening is not
an invisible factor added to the chemical reactions, as the quotations we gave earlier from
Watson and his fellow authors would have us construe such a ‘vitalistic’ role for the soul. It is
not as if the soul were an extra non-sensible chemical compound or enzyme that would have
to be included in the molecular-biological systems representation of the living body. St
Macrina is clear: the hypostasis of the living body is due to the mixing together of the
elements, due to the molecular biology, taken in and of itself, of that living body. However in
some fashion beyond human understanding, St Macrina says, the soul enlivens the body, not
by the soul’s essence but by an operation (energeia). As we ourselves have remarked, this
enlivening, as regards the molecular biology of the living body, performs a role in the living
body analogous to the conservatory role of God himself in creation: it upholds the possibility
that that molecular biology might continue and that the body not decompose.

This is extremely important for bioethics. It contains all the problems of Orthodox reflection
on the nature of the soul in the face of a materialistic and mechanistic (empiricist)
metaphysic such as Orthodoxy encounters today in the West. Let us therefore look at this
definition piece by piece.

First, the definition says that there is no communion of the soul according to its substance
with the elements of the body. This would seem to give the better translation to Moore who
construed that ‘elemental things’ referred to the elements. But those ‘elemental things’ were
the sensible aspects of the elements, their qualities. That is what St Macrina meant. Now St
Macrina is saying that the body is a mixture of elements. We would say: the molecular
biology of the body, including the molecular biology of the nervous system. We can elucidate
—with great toil—the molecular biology of the brain, nervous system, endocrine system,
body. We can represent the reaction pathways systems-theoretically. They have nodes which
are analysable in detail. These nodes are the intersections of reactions, and the analysis
yields a systems representation which describes how the reaction network acts and will act.
We can do all of that. These things describe the body.

St Macrina, however, says that there is no communion according to the substance of the soul
between the simple and formless nature of the soul and the grossness of the body. An
analogy might be recalled: God, whose nature is completely different from anything in
creation, whether sensible or intelligible, has no communion according to his substance with
anything in creation. The analogy that St Macrina is drawing is clear: just as God, who is
completely different from creation, keeps the creation in existence, penetrating the creation
not with his substance but with his operations (energeies), so the soul, which has no
communion with the body according to the soul’s substance—that is, the soul is in no wise of
the same nature as the body—enlivens the body.

What is the connection between this enlivening and molecular biology? As we have pointed
out previously, modern molecular biology resolutely rejects—as a matter of philosophical
and scientific paradigm—any concept of ‘vitalism’, which is precisely what this ‘enlivening’ of
the body by the soul would be construed by a modern molecular biologist to be. But let us
look a little more carefully at this. St Macrina has said that the hypostasis—this is a difficult
word; we might say ‘identity’—of the body is the commixture of the elements. We would say:
the body’s molecular biological substrate. St Macrina treats this as a physical or sensible
affair. She says that the substance of the soul has no connection with this molecular
biological substrate. She then says that the soul enlivens the body. Let us supply this
interpretation: God upholds the universe so that natural laws work. As St Macrina has said,
God interweaves the disparate elements with their opposed qualities into an integrated
whole. Similarly, the soul enlivens the body so that the laws of molecular biology work, so
that the body does not decompose. In this sense, the soul enlivens the body in exactly the
same way that St Macrina—and St Maximos in his Mystagogia—say that God keeps the
creation in existence: by upholding the elements of the body against their contrary tendency
to disintegrate (i.e. to fall away from each other in compounds). Hence, in this view, the
enlivening nature of the soul is what, in the general case when we are alive, prevents the
tissue of an organ from beginning to rot. It does not change the chemical reactions but it
supports the continued operation of the chemical reactions, just as God’s keeping creation in
existence does not alter the physical chemistry of the sun, but keeps the sun with its physical
chemistry going.

St Macrina says that the soul is simple and formless. These are ontological characterizations.
‘Simple’ is ‘without parts’: the simple cannot be decomposed into constituents. ‘Formless’ is
‘without shape in a sensible way’, but more fundamentally, ‘uncharacterizable’ or
‘uncategorizable’. In On the Making of Man,[11] St Gregory goes further: just as God in his
substance is unknowable, so the soul in its substance is unknowable. In both cases only their
operations reveal them and their presence in the sensible world. Moreover, just above, St
Macrina has indicated the same thing by referring to the substance of the soul with the
phrase ‘whatever that might ever be guessed to be’.

This position is sound theology. However, it is radically different from anything that anyone
working in the current materialistic and mechanistic paradigm of biology would accept. Such
a person might pose this question: well, what does your concept of an occult (i.e. hidden,
since non-sensible and non-measurable) soul do? Given what you say, I can continue to do
my molecular biology just as I was doing it before, since the substance of the soul that you
claim exists has no connection with the molecular biology of the body. But you say that its
operations—which I can’t measure anyway—are what make the human body alive. What’s
the use of this concept?

The use of the concept of soul is not in molecular biology. It has to do with the human
person: the person who is an autonomous actor, morally responsible for his actions,
possessing freedom of will to choose his course of action; who was created in the image of
God; who can know God both in this life and in the next; whose identity does not disappear
with the fact of bodily death; who can love, serve others, both God and man; who has the
freedom to turn to God in ascetical endeavour; who can purify himself so as to attain, by the
grace of God, to an intuitive apprehension of God himself. The concept also enables us to
understand the personhood of other persons, to evaluate our moral choices—especially,
today, in bioethics—in a way consistent with the actual personhood of the other person, with
the actual sources of the personhood of the other person.
To finish the definition, St Macrina says that, while according to its substance the soul has no
communion with the elements of the body, it is mixed with them, in a way beyond human
comprehension, by means of its enlivening operation (energeia).[12]

Some points here: Starting from the Classical Greeks, those philosophers who treated the
soul as something other than the body have recognized that things that affect the body can
affect the operations of the soul. We earlier mentioned damage to the eye.[13] Somewhere,
also, drunkenness is mentioned, on which principle it would not be denied that drugs such as
tranquillizers can affect the mood or disposition of the soul. Hence, there is no suggestion
that, while the soul operates through the instrumentality of the body, what you do to the
molecular biology of your body, nervous system or brain has no effect on your mood or
disposition. But not on the substance of the soul itself: it is worthwhile to recall Aristotle’s
remark that if the bad eye were to be replaced with a good eye, the mind (nous), which is
what sees, would again see. When a man gets drunk, his mood is altered, but when he sobers
up, his mind (nous) recovers its former faculties. Similarly in the case of illnesses, including
illnesses of the central nervous system: these illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s Syndrome,
impede the ability of the mind (nous) to express itself. They do not, however, disturb the
substance or essence of the mind (nous)—what gives the human person his personal identity
or personhood.

Next, it might be remarked that part of the problem in assessing St Macrina’s doctrine of the
relation of the soul to the body has to do with the limitations of our scientific paradigms.
When Galileo’s mechanics was new, for example, Hobbes constructed a psychology of man
based strictly on that mechanics. Descartes himself constructed his anthropology on the
premise that man’s body was a mechanical system of the sort that was discussed in the
mechanics of Galileo, whereas his soul was the sort of intelligible substance that St Macrina
has defined. However, since Descartes was restricted in his understanding of the human
body to a rather primitive theory of mechanics in physics, he was faced with the conundrum
of how the ‘ghost in the machine’ interacted with the machine; he came up with the solution
that the soul acted on the body through the pineal gland. This is an example of an attempt to
combine the notion of an intelligible, mental (noera) soul with a scientific paradigm in
biology: the intelligible soul with the machine: this was the biological paradigm of Descarte’s
time. Hume himself, drawing on what he understood to be the principles of Newton’s
mechanics for his own paradigm of the human sciences, dismissed completely the existence
of the intelligible soul and the intelligible mind (nous); this is a third example of the
adaptation of a paradigm in physics to philosophical psychology.

Today, our understanding of both physics and molecular biology is more sophisticated,
although the current paradigm in molecular biology is, as we have already discussed,
systems-based and therefore productive of models equivalent in logical power to the
algorithm. Again, however, the issue arises of how the soul communicates with the body. St
Macrina asserts that this is a matter beyond human understanding. Here it must be
remarked that just as the mechanics of Galileo was crude, and the psychology of Hobbes
based on it, so the molecular biology of today will in five hundred years be seen to be crude,
and the psychologies based on it: these are models, or paradigms, for the practice of ‘normal
science’ and they are superseded the one after the other. Hence, the reader must be cautious:
it is one thing to discuss in philosophy how the intelligible soul is related to the sensible
body; it is another thing to attempt to harmonize the concept of the intelligible soul or
intelligible mind with one’s current paradigm either in physics[14] or in biology. The
paradigm is an unfinished business, whatever the paradigm; the reality is the object itself
with which the paradigm deals—paradigmatically.

On this notion of the practice of ‘normal science’ according to sociologically defined and
maintained paradigms, see, of course, Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.[15] We go a little further than Kuhn in treating all scientific theories
as contingent approximations to reality, a reality that remains forever unknowable to us in
its fullness: all biological paradigms are approximations to the reality that is the cell or the
body itself.

We think that this is the great lesson to be learned from the transition from Newtonian
physics to special relativity: the philosophy of nature underlying the two theories is not the
same. A naïve view would be that the philosophy of nature underlying relativity is a ‘better’
view of nature than the philosophy of nature underlying Newton’s physics: each scientific
revolution brings about a progress in our understanding of nature. We are not so sure. While
it is surely true that each authentic scientific revolution brings about a greater ability to do,
say, engineering on the domain being studied, we are not so sure that the philosophy of
nature underlying the new mathematical formalism is necessarily any closer ‘to the Truth’
than the previous one. Since, for example, it is quite possible that both the special and
general theories of relativity will one day be superseded, together with the philosophy of
nature that underlies them, it is in no wise clear that the philosophy of nature underlying
relativity is necessarily any closer ‘to the Truth’ than the philosophy of nature underlying
Newton’s physics. This is how Kuhn himself expresses himself on this point:

…Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different
environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in
which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress.

Compared with the notion of progress most prevalent among both philosophers of science and laymen,
however, this position lacks an essential element. A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its
predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but
also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that
successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently,
generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a
theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory
populates nature and what is “really there.”

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of “truth” for application to whole theories, but
this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like “really
there;” the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now
seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausibility of the
view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s
improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent
direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means
in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s.
Though the temptation to describe that position [of Kuhn’s] as relativistic [i.e. not based on a single
objective criterion] is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be
relativism, I cannot see that the relativist [in the philosophy of science, as Kuhn is espousing it] loses
anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences.[16]

The next point is that this conception of the soul is going to have immediate consequences in
the soteriological program of him who accepts it: it is going to affect how he understands the
‘Work out your salvation in fear and trembling,’ of St Paul.[17] It puts asceticism—and
Hesychasm—on a soteriological basis. It orients the asceticism of the monk. The monk’s
asceticism is inserted into the context of the Christian doctrine of salvation; it is no longer a
matter of taking up an amusing hobby, as we might take up golf in preference to tennis. This
is not to suggest that we all must become monks; that is another matter. St Macrina’s
doctrine of the soul poses this issue: how am I going to work out my salvation in fear and
trembling, I who am a soul mixed with a body in the fashion stated? As we proceed towards
Evagrius’ psychology in Volume II, and towards the Hesychast method of St Hesychios in
Volume III, we will see that this Orthodox conception of the soul will play a central role in
the definition of the ascetical and Hesychast program.[18]

The final point is that this doctrine of the soul completely cuts off all Orthodox asceticism
from the program of humanistic psychology to interpret religious experience as a physical
state of the brain that can be induced by natural (physical) means. We shall see, for example,
that Evagrius Pontikos posits, in the works that we shall study in Volume II, that the basic
treatment for the passions (vices) of the soul is spiritual charity. However, the monk does not
engage in spiritual charity to alter the biochemistry of his brain, but because spiritual charity
is a therapy for his formless and immaterial soul.

[1] Later we shall see the connection between mind (nous) and the broader concept, soul (psuche).

[2] Genetic.

[3] Actually, of course, the soul (psuche); we will later see the connection.

[5] This is of course Aristotle’s typology of soul (psuche), of which St Macrina will make explicit use below, without,
however, ascribing it to its source.

[6] Making G.

[7] Consider in this regard St Thomas Aquinas’ own doctrine of the nature of the human mind as an inferior part of a
grand mosaic of intelligence which extends from God through the various ranks of angels to man. This will be discussed
in Chapter IV, below.

[8] Orthodox theologians will wonder about how St Gregory handles the distinction ‘in the image (kat’ eikona)’ – ‘in the
likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’ and how he handles the consequences of Adam’s Fall. As far as we ourselves understand, the
terminological distinction ‘kat’ eikona – kath’ homoiosin’ was established in Orthodox theology by St Maximos the
Confessor, who, it will be seen, had read St Gregory. However, the distinction is made and used fully by St Diadochos of
Photike (c.400–a.486) in the Gnostic Chapters, written c.450. Although it is certain that St Gregory never uses the term
‘in the likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’, only ‘in the image (kat’ eikona)’, it will be seen that he has the distinction embedded
in his theology. Moreover, St Gregory, as we shall see, is quite clear about the consequences of the Fall.

[12] The distinction essence – energy (ousia – energeia), so important to the Fourteenth Century Palamite defence of
Hesychasm, is therefore explicitly found in a text written c.386.

[13] That was certainly in the context of Aristotle, who however cannot considered to have treated the soul as something
distinct from the body. However, the point remains.

[14] Today, we sometimes read that the mind is quantum leaps within the molecules that constitute the neurons of the
brain.

[18] We will address those aspects of Evagrius’ doctrine of the person that cannot be accepted by the Orthodox in
Chapter III, below

Chapter I -- 17

Let us continue:

Therefore, neither when the elements which are in the body are loosed towards
themselves is that lost which binds them together by means of the enlivening
operation (energeia), but just as each element is separately given life while the
mixture of the elements is still constituted, the soul penetrating equally and
similarly into all the parts that complete the body—and one would not say that
the soul, that which is in all of these elements and which in each of them
implants the enlivening force, is either solid or hard when it is commixed with
the earthy element, or else moist or cold, or the quality which is opposed to cold
—, thus also it is not beyond reason for that simple and incomposite nature to
be deemed also to remain in each of the parts after the dissolution [of the
body], when the mixture is loosed and returns again to its familiars, and that
which once and for all, by some unspeakable principle, has become natural to
the mixture of the elements also to remain forever in those things in which it
has been mixed, by no means whatsoever having been diverted from the
attachment which has occurred to it once and for all. For it is not the case, when
that which is compounded has been dissolved, that that which is not
compounded is at risk of dissolving together with the composite.

What is St Macrina saying?

Let us first give a paraphrase of this passage: Therefore, when the body disintegrates and its
elements return to themselves, the soul, that which binds the elements together by means of
its enlivening operation (energeia), is not lost; that is, it also does not disintegrate. Rather,
just as the soul penetrates equally and similarly into all parts of the body and gives life to
each of the body’s elements as long as the body is constituted, similarly, it is not
unreasonable to think that the soul, that simple and incomposite nature, remains in each of
the parts of the body when the body dissolves and the elements return to their like.
Moreover, it is not unreasonable to think that the soul, that which once and for all [1] has
become natural to the elements of the body, also remains forever in those elements with
which it has been mixed, the bond never being sundered which has been established once
and for all between it and the parts of body. Moreover, it is not the case that when that which
is compounded, the body, dissolves or disintegrates, then that which is not compounded, the
soul, is at risk of dissolving along with the composite body. (However, one would not say that
the soul, that which is in each of the elements and which imparts to each of them an
enlivening force or power, is either solid or hard when it is commixed with the earthy
element, or else moist or cold or hot. That is, one would not say that in penetrating equally
and similarly into all the elements of the body and in enlivening all those elements of the
body, the soul in any way takes on the sensible qualities of those elements.)

St Macrina is talking about the dissolution of the body and the result on the soul, and about
the relation between the soul and the individual elements into which the body decomposes.
She says, first, that when the human body is constituted, or alive, then the soul enlivens each
and every element—we might say, atom—of the body individually, and binds all those
elements together, penetrating equally and similarly into ‘all the parts that complete the
body’.

She says, second, that when the body disintegrates—‘when the elements which are in the
body are loosed towards themselves’—then the soul is not lost.
She says, third, that although the soul penetrates each and every part of the body it does not
take on the sensible qualities of those parts (hard, soft, cold, hot and so on) even as accidents
in the Aristotelian sense. This is merely a reiteration of the principle that the soul, being
intelligible, is not susceptible of predication with sensible attributes.

St Macrina then says, fourth, that it is not beyond reason for the soul to remain with each
part of the body as the body decomposes and its parts separate. This cannot be understood as
a distribution of the substance of the soul among the parts of the body, in view of St
Macrina’s earlier insistence that the soul is simple and incomposite, something that implies
that any distribution of the substance of the soul would be impossible. This must therefore
be understood as a specific operation (energeia) of the simple and incomposite soul. St
Macrina does say that it is not unreasonable to think that since the soul has once and for all
become natural to the body (or, grown up together with the body),[2] then the soul, simple
and incomposite, remains with all the parts of the body even after their dissolution, given
that once-and-for-all union. However, St Macrina says, although the body is subject to
disintegration, the soul most certainly is not.

What are we to make of this?

It is a theological explanation of why we venerate the relics and even the personal
possessions of saints. Hence, while to the modern ear it may sound like nonsense, St Macrina
is saying something quite sober. The soul of the saint is simple and incomposite and goes to
Heaven; it is not distributed over the parts of the saint’s body. Moreover, only God is
omnipresent, so that if the saint’s soul is here, it is not there, although this ‘being
somewhere’ of the saint’s soul cannot be conceived in strictly spatial terms, given St
Macrina’s previous assertion that the soul is not subject to being in a place spatially.

Despite its not being distributed over the parts of the disintegrating body, however, the
saint’s soul retains a bond with all the parts of the body which is its own. Moreover, since the
soul of the saint has become completely permeated by the operations (energeies) of the Holy
Spirit, then these operations (energeies) spill over into the relics of the saint’s body, with
which the soul of the saint has this bond.
What is this bond of the soul of the saint with the relic? Let us return to the analogy between
the soul in the body and God in his creation. God penetrates creation not in his substance
(completely sundered from all creation) but by his operations (energeies). Similarly, the
bond between the saint’s soul and the parts of the saint’s body is an operation (energeia) of
the soul; this bond does not affect the substance of the saint’s soul—this St Macrina takes
pains to make clear—but it is nonetheless a real operation (energeia) of the saint’s soul.

Moreover, when we venerate a relic, we do not venerate something impersonal but holy—like
holy water, say—but the relic of this or that saint. Hence, the operation of the saint’s soul is a
personal operation (energeia) of the soul of this or that saint on the parts of the body that
belongs to that saint. Hence, venerating the relic of a saint is not a matter of venerating
something impersonal that has been sanctified impersonally by the operations (energeies) of
the Holy Spirit. Rather, the relic has been imprinted by the operations (energeies) of this or
that soul—and that soul, in the case of a saint, has been united to the Holy Spirit. Hence, in
the case of a saint, the Holy Spirit participates in the bond between the saint and the part of
the saint’s body that we venerate.

The same logic applies also to miraculous icons, that is, icons which are associated, on an
ongoing basis, with miracles.

Now what St Macrina is saying is that in the case of every man, whether saint or sinner, the
soul through its operations (energeies) has this unbreakable bond with all the parts of the
body. Moreover, this bond is not lost when the body disintegrates, although the substance of
the soul is not distributed over the atoms of the body: it is a matter of the operations
(energeies) of the simple and formless soul.

St Gregory now poses the problem of the dissolution and scattering of the parts of the body:

And I said: But that the elements should coincide with each other and be
separated from each other and that this should be the constitution and
dissolution of the body, no one would contradict. Since, however, the distance
is understood to be great between each of these elements which are
heterogeneously disposed towards each other according to spatial position and
according to the difference and property of qualities when they have come
together with each other round the substrate of the elements, it is a logical
consequence that this mental (noeran) and dimensionless nature we call soul
(psuche) should be adapted by nature towards the united body. If, however,
these elements should be separated from each other and become scattered
wherever the nature [of each element] should lead each, what is the soul to rely
on when its vehicle has been scattered from it into many places? Just as some
sailor, when the ship has disintegrated in a shipwreck, is unable at the same
time to swim on all the particles of the ship, they having been scattered in the
sea, one in one place, one in another place—for at all events taking the one
particle that chances he will abandon the rest to be borne by the waves—in the
same way, in the separation of the elements, the soul, not having the nature to
be split up together [with the body], will, even if it finds it difficult to separate
itself from the body, be at all events split off from the other elements, having
adhered to one certain element; and the chain of reasoning will not even give
one more to deem that the soul is immortal, since it lives in one element, than
mortal, since it is no longer in the many.

Let us paraphrase this text: No one would disagree that the constitution and dissolution of
the body coincides with the conjunction and separation of the elements that make up that
body. We understand, however, that there is a great distance between the elements of the
body, which are variously disposed towards each other in regard to spatial position and in
regard to the differences in qualities or characteristics that each element of the body has,
when those elements come together to form the body. It is a logical consequence, then, that
that mental (noeros) and dimensionless nature we call the soul should be adapted by nature
to the united body. If, however, the elements of the body should become separated from each
other and become scattered wherever the nature of each element should lead it, what is the
soul going to do, its vehicle having been scattered into so many pieces? Like a sailor in a
shipwreck who seizes any chance piece of wreckage that is at hand and abandons the rest to
the waves, the soul will, even if it finds it difficult to depart from the body, seize on some part
or other of the body and abandon the other parts—precisely because the soul is simple in
nature and cannot be divided along with the parts of the body. But the logic of the situation is
then such that we can no more say that the soul is immortal, since it lives on in one part of
the body, the one that it has seized, than that the soul is mortal, since it no longer lives on in
the other parts of the body, those which it has abandoned.

We find the logic of the passage somewhat difficult. The first sentence is clear. The next
sentence posits the great distance that is understood to exist between the elements which are
heterogeneously disposed the one towards the other, as regards spatial position, the
differences of the qualities of each element and the properties of the qualities of each
element, when the elements come together round the substrate of the elements. While these
things are true, we ourselves do not see what they have to do with the conclusion, that it is a
logical consequence that the mental (noeros) and dimensionless nature should naturally be
united to the united body. Moreover, we cannot fathom what the substrate of the elements is
that St Gregory is referring to. Recourse to the dictionary does not help, given the
preposition, the case and the fact that the substrate, or even subject, is the substrate, or
subject, of the elements. Possibly what St Gregory means is that the substrate is the soul, not
in the Aristotelian sense of substrate, which is underlying matter completely without form,
but in the sense that the soul acts as a kind of axis or pole round which the body as it were
coalesces. Then the passage would be somewhat easier to grasp: since the soul acts as a pole
round which the disparate elements form the body, it is natural for the soul to be united to
the united body.

The rest is clear enough: St Gregory is saying that the soul will adhere at death to some one
element or particle of the body and abandon the other elements or particles of the body, so
that it would be equally plausible to say that the soul is immortal, since it adheres to the one
particle, as it would be to say that it is mortal, since it has abandoned all the others. One
point deserves comment: St Gregory says ‘[E]ven if it finds it difficult to separate itself from
the body, having adhered to one certain element, [it will] at all events be split off from the
others.’ What is involved here is St Gregory’s response to St Macrina’s claim that the soul has
an unbreakable bond, not by substance (ousia) but by operation (energeia), with each
element or particle of the body. St Gregory is counter-arguing that the soul has a more or less
sensible or physical relationship with the elements or particles of the body, not an intelligible
or suprasensible one; that the soul will adhere in a sensible fashion to some one particle of
the body; and that, just as things do which are sensible, it will therefore necessarily break its
connection to the other particles of the body when they are dispersed ‘even if it finds it
difficult to separate itself from [the elements of] the body’.
This conclusion is not so simplistic as it might seem. St Gregory is insisting on complete
clarity regarding the connection between the soul and the body. Here he is saying: well yes,
the soul can be attached to an integrated body, but when the body disintegrates, is not the
soul going to stick to some one part of the body and forget the others? The problem is deep.
What St Gregory is driving at is a complete insistence on the spiritual nature of the soul. As
St Gregory records, St Macrina has said that the soul has no participation of substance in the
elements of the body.

Let us hear St Macrina’s answer:

She said: But that which is intelligible (noeton) and dimensionless is neither
contracted nor dispersed, for contraction and dispersion is the property of
sensible bodies. In equal measure, according to its own formless and bodiless
nature, the soul is present in both the union of the elements round the body and
in their separation, neither being straitened in the mixture of those elements
which are compressed together, neither abandoning them when they depart
towards those things that are related to them and that are according to their
nature, even should it seem that that distance is great which is perceived in the
otherness of the elements. For great is the difference of the upward tending and
light element towards the heavy and earthy element, and the warm element
towards the cold element, and the wet element towards its opposite. However,
it is no toil to the mental (noera) nature [i.e. the soul] to be present in each
element, in which it has been implanted once and for all by means of a mixing,
not being split apart by the opposition of the elements. For it is not the case
that, since these elements are thought to be far from each other according to
spatial dimension and according to a certain property, the dimensionless
nature for that reason labours in being united to these spatially separated
elements, since now it is also permissible for the intellect (dianoia) both to be
extended to contemplate Heaven and to be extended in its curiosities to the
ends of the world, and the contemplative faculty of the soul is not fragmented
being extended over such great distances. Therefore, there is no obstacle at all
for the soul to be present in equal manner in the elements of the body both
when they are joined by the coming together and when they are loosed apart
from the commixture. For just as when gold and silver are fused together, a
certain artful power is contemplated which fused together the materials, and if
the one element is again separated from the other, the reason (logos) of the art
nonetheless remains in each; and the material was distributed, the art however
was not distributed along with the material—for how could the indivisible be
divided? According to the same reasoning, the mental (noera) nature of the
soul both is contemplated in the coming together of the elements and is not
expelled when they have dissolved, but it remains in them; and in their
separation, extended along with them, it is not cut off; neither is it cut into
pieces according to the number of elements. For this is a property of the bodily
and dimensional nature, whereas the mental (noera) and dimensionless nature
[i.e. the soul] does not accept the passions from dimension. Therefore, there is
in these elements [of the body] the soul which once and for all came to be in
them, no necessity at all tearing it way from its common growth with them.
What therefore is there gloomy in these things if that which is seen is
exchanged for the formless, and in favour of what has your intellect (dianoia)
thus slandered death to you?

Let us begin with a paraphrase: That which is intelligible (noeton) and therefore
dimensionless, the soul, is neither subject to contraction nor dispersion, for contraction and
dispersion pertain to something that is sensible. Because of its formless and bodiless nature,
the soul is equally present in the elements both in the union of the elements in the body and
in their separation; and neither is it compressed when it is mixed with the elements which
are compressed together into the united body nor does it abandon the elements of the body
when the body disintegrates and the elements depart towards those things that are naturally
related to them. And this is so even though it should seem that that distance is great which is
perceived in the heterogeneity of the elements. For the various elements have great
differences from their opposite elements. Despite that, however, it is not difficult for the
mental (noera) soul to be present in each element, in which it has been implanted once and
for all[3] by means of a mixing, the soul not being split apart by the different and opposed
qualities of the heterogeneous elements during the dissolution of the body. For the
dimensionless soul is easily united to those spatially separated elements, even though those
elements are far from each other. As proof of this, consider how the intellect (dianoia) even
now can be extended to contemplate Heaven, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, be
extended in thought to the ends of the world, without for all that the contemplative faculty of
the soul being fragmented by being extended over such great distances. Therefore, there is
no obstacle at all for the soul to be present in equal manner in the elements of the body both
when they are joined by their having come together in the formation of the united body and
when they are loosed from the body through the disintegration of that body. To take an
example, when gold and silver are alloyed, one sees the art of him who alloyed the gold and
silver fused together with the gold and silver in the alloy. However, if the gold is then
separated from the silver, the art of alloying still remains in each of the gold and silver:
although the gold and silver have been separated from each other and distributed, the art has
not been separated and distributed with the metals, for how could the indivisible art be
divided? According to the same reasoning, the mental (noera) soul is found in the union of
the elements in the united body and is not expelled from the elements when the body has
disintegrated and the elements have gone their separate ways. Moreover, although the
mental (noera) soul is extended with the elements both in their union in the body and in
their separation and spatial dispersion, the soul is not cut off from the elements, nor is its
substance cut into pieces according to the number of particles. For to be cut into pieces is a
property of a bodily and dimensional nature, whereas the mental (noera) and dimensionless
soul does not suffer the things that arise from dimension. Therefore, there is in the elements
of the body the soul which once and for all came to be in them, no necessity at all tearing it
way from its union with them. What therefore is there which is gloomy in these things if that
which is lost in death, that is, that which is seen, is exchanged in favour of that which is
formless, that is, the life of the soul after death; and in favour of what has your intellect thus
slandered death to you as the destruction of the soul?

What is this all about?

We have on the one hand the body and the characteristics of bodily substances, expressed in
Aristotle’s metaphysic. This is precisely the world of empiricism. On the other hand we have
the mental (noera) and dimensionless soul. The whole argument is based on the assertion
that the soul, being intelligible, and not sensible and possessed of dimension, obeys different
rules from things in the sensible world.

St Macrina is quite clear that the elements—we would say, the molecular biological
constituents—of the body are separated from one another in space and in quality. We would
say, in physical and chemical properties. St Macrina goes on to say that when the body
dissolves, then the like will join to like: the water over here, the fire over there. This is a
direct borrowing from Aristotle. What St Macrina wants to say is that the body disintegrates.
Aristotle expressed it in those terms.

Now what St Macrina is saying is that the soul is not subject to the laws of sensible reality; in
particular, it is not governed by concepts of distance.

St Macrina emphasizes the ‘mental (noera)’ character of the soul—‘possessing mind’. This
would give almost a conscious aspect to these operations; we might want to say that the soul
knows the atoms of the body which belongs to it. However, ‘noera’ can be used for ‘noete
(intelligible)’ and it may be excessive to dwell on the possible implications of the use of
‘noera’ here. What St Macrina certainly is saying is that the operations of the soul by which
the soul knows or marks the atoms of its body are free of concepts of distance: the soul is free
of the consequences of dimension.

Underlying St Macrina’s argument is the distinction between the substance (ousia) of the
intelligible soul, which is neither dispersed nor cut into pieces, and the operations
(energeies) of the soul, which are not subject to the constraints of spatial dimension. It is the
operations (energeies) of the soul that accomplish the bonding of the soul with the elements
of the body from conception, not the substance (ousia) of the soul.

Finally, it might be remarked that St Macrina’s last sentence hearkens back to the sentence
with which we began: the fear that death brings about the destruction of the soul. St Macrina
is saying: no, death brings about the true life of Heaven.

This passage closes this section of On the Soul and the Resurrection and marks a transition
to the topic of the parts of the soul, for us in discussing Hesychasm a very important issue.

We have here finished our discussion of the basic issues in Orthodox theology concerning the
nature of the soul as regards bioethics, with the exception of a discussion of when the soul
begins to exist and how. We will discuss those matters, after we have discussed Evagrius
Pontikos’ cosmology, in Section 12 of Chapter III.
Let us summarize the doctrine of St Gregory of Nyssa concerning the soul before we
continue:

The soul is an intelligible and mental substance bonded once and for all by its own
operations, but not in its substance or essence, to the body which is its very own from
conception; that soul enlivens the body and operates through it insofar as the organs of the
body are intact and thus permit it to operate; after death, the soul retains its own identity as
a simple and formless and dimensionless and intelligible substance while at the same time
retaining a bond with each and every atom of its body, however separated the atoms of the
body might be the one from the other through the body’s decomposition after death.
Moreover, the soul is created in the image of God, which means that in the creation of man,
man’s soul shared in all the attributes of God save one, namely that man was created and
God uncreated.

This is a convenient place to begin a new chapter. However, the reader should understand
that we are not skipping any part of the dialogue: in the next chapter, we continue exactly
where we have left off.

Let us now see how St Gregory makes the transition to the topic of the parts of the soul.

[1] At conception.

[2] From conception; St Gregory addresses this in On the Making of Man; we will discuss it in Chapter III.

[3] At conception

Chapter II -- 1

II The Anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa

 Part Two

I, then, taking up into my intellect (dianoia) the definition which in the

discussion before this she had made concerning the soul (psuche)—which
definition says that (the soul) is a mental (noera) substance and that it puts an
enlivening power into the organic (organiko) body towards the operation of the
senses—said that the definition did not adequately show to me the powers that
are contemplated in the soul, for our soul is not only active round the scientific
and contemplative intellect (dianoia), working such a thing as this in the
mental part (noeron) of the substance, neither does it manage the senses only
towards the operation that is according to nature, but much movement is
contemplated in nature according to desire and also much according to anger;
each of these things generically existing in us, we see in many and various
distinctions the movement [of the soul] advancing in the operations of both
desire and anger.

Many things are to be seen which are led by desire; many things again which
spring up from the irascible cause; and none of these things is body. What is
bodiless is at all events mental (noeron). The definition declared the soul to be a
mental (noeron) sort of thing, so that one of two absurdities comes up from the
chain of reasoning of the argument: either, both anger and desire are other
souls in us, and a multitude of souls are to be seen instead of one; or, neither is
the intellectual part (dianoetikon) that is in us to be deemed to be soul. For the
mental attribute (noeron) applied in equal measure to all [i.e. intellect, desire
and anger] either will prove them all to be souls, or will exclude each of these
equally from the property of being soul.

What is this all about?

St Macrina has defined an intellectual aspect of man and said that it is the simple and
formless soul. St Gregory says: well, wait, we have the aspects of man called desire and
anger, and we see that much of human action is under the guidance or governance of desire
or anger. However, since neither desire nor anger is the body, both must be mental (noeros).
But the definition of the soul that you have given is such that either anger and desire are
souls which are different from the soul which you have defined to be the intellect, and each
man has a multitude of souls—St Gregory is essaying a reductio ad absurdum[1]—or else
none of intellect, desire and anger is soul.

Before turning to the substance of the argument, we would like to address the concepts of
‘nature (phusis)’, ‘according to nature (kata phusin)’ and ‘contrary to nature (para phusin)’.
Aristotle discusses these concepts in the Physics.[2] For Aristotle, nature is a given; he even
goes so far as to say that to try to prove to someone that nature exists is to depart from the
self-respect proper to a serious philosopher. In any event, a natural movement or motion,
one according to nature, is one that happens ‘always or for the most part’. The movement of
the moon is natural, according to nature. The sense of ‘for the most part’ includes, inter alia,
biological phenomena, which do not have the absolute regularity of, say, the movements of
the planets. A natural movement, one according to nature, is therefore one that a body will
make ‘always or for the most part’ if ‘left alone’. Recall that in Aristotle motion is not merely
motion in space, but includes both change, and generation and corruption.

The opposite of a natural movement is a movement that is contrary to nature. This is a

movement in which some other object or force or power constrains the body to move in a
way different from the way it would move if it were ‘left alone’. An upward movement of a
heavy body is contrary to nature (‘contrary to gravity’) and presupposes some constraint—
something that forces the body to move upward, contrary to its natural movement to the
centre of the earth, its movement according to nature.

These concepts are defined by Aristotle in the broadest sense; their application to ethics is
secondary. It seems that the ethical sense of ‘according to nature’ derives from the sense of
‘always or for the most part’. Of course, the concept of the work (ergon) of man also enters in
here: an ethical action contrary to nature is one in which a man acts contrary to the work
(ergon) proper to a man.
The next thing we wish to look at is the notion of the parts of the soul. Starting with Plato,
who appears to have taken the notion from the Pythagoreans, we have in Greek philosophy a
division of the human soul into the rational, irascible and desiring parts: mind, temper and
desire. This tripartite division is what, in essence, St Gregory is introducing.

Now, St Macrina has made of the mind (nous) of man, the principle of human identity in a
very broad sense; we have seen that it is in the mind (nous) that St Macrina has located the
image of God in man. For her argument, this creates the problem of explaining the other two
parts of the soul, the irascible and desiring parts, and this is what St Gregory’s question is
setting the stage for a discussion of.

Before we continue with St Macrina’s response, we want to address this tripartite division of
the soul directly, because the concept is fundamental to Orthodox anthropology.

In the rest of this work on the psychological basis of mental prayer in the heart, our program
will be to follow the development of the ascetical and contemplative psychology of Evagrius
Pontikos—based on this anthropology[3]—and the adaptation of Evagrius’ ascetical system
to Hesychasm, as St Hesychios adapts it in his On Sobriety, a key early text in the Philokalia.
The questions that will arise will be of this sort: Given the tripartite division of the soul, what
is the operation according to nature of each part of the soul? What does it mean for a part of
the soul to operate according to nature? What does it mean for a part of the soul to operate
contrary to nature? Why should this have come about? What can we do to move from a
condition wherein the parts of our soul operate contrary to nature to a condition wherein the
parts of our soul operate according to nature? What does this have to do with virtue? What
are the virtues? What is prayer? What does prayer have to do with all of this? What is the
connection between virtue and prayer? What does this have to do with contemplation? How
is God known?

From the above questions, it can be seen that we here mark a transition from a discussion of
anthropology which has as central issues the Orthodox understanding of man in the context
of Western philosophy and the image of man in bioethics—a transition from this sort of
discussion to a discussion of ascetical psychology. Why is man put together the way he is?
What is the ascetical program of the Orthodox monk? What is its motivation? How is it
rooted in a psychology based on the Orthodox anthropology that we have just been
discussing? These are the questions that we now begin to discuss.

Let us make some further remarks about each of the three parts of the soul, since, as we
progress, it will be seen that the Orthodox ascetic has a quite specific understanding of their
character.

The first is mind (nous). We have devoted considerable time to this concept. We began with a
discussion of the existence of the mind (nous) based on its intellectual operations (e.g.
medicine, astronomy). These operations lead to scientific knowledge. We will see as we
progress another kind of knowledge—contemplative—which will be called gnosis (gnosis).

This contemplative knowledge—gnosis—is not propositional. It is not based on syllogisms,

measurements, inferences, data. It is not the sort of knowledge recognized as knowledge by
the positivist philosopher. In ordinary conversation, it might be called wisdom. It is
recognized when one speaks with an ascetic who gives an ‘enlightened answer’ ‘full of
wisdom’, an answer to a problem that human science does not address. The answer will not
make you any the wiser what hour the sun will rise tomorrow, but it might help you to know
what to do with yourself once the sun has risen. Moreover, it will be seen that the
quintessential function or work (ergon) of the mind (nous) is to know God, and this not
discursively but—in the philosophical sense of ‘directly’—intuitively. Hence, our program is
directed towards answering the question ‘How can I know God in prayer?’, and also
presupposes that the mind (nous) is such that it can know God, although much time will be
spent precisely on this point: ‘What does it mean for the mind (nous) to know God?’

Similarly to the mind (nous), the irascible part of the soul, or temper, has a much broader
character than we might suppose from ordinary usage in the West. Speaking informally now
to motivate our discussion, we might associate the following with the irascible part of the
soul or temper: anger, courage, steadfastness, manliness, resoluteness in battle. It can be
seen that this is far more than mere anger; it has to do with the manly virtues; and we will
see that the ascetic will use the irascible part of his soul in a manly way—even in the case of
woman ascetics. The irascible part of the soul is often compared to a dog, and it will be seen
that just as we want a trained dog, we will want to have a ‘trained’ irascible part of our soul.
The other part of the soul is the desiring part, or, simply, desire. This, of course, includes the
urge to procreate. However, it also includes the appetite for food. Moreover, it will be seen
that the desiring part will be assigned a positive role in the ascetic’s life. We will encounter
‘Eros (eros)’ spoken of in relation to the mystic’s aspiration for God. Eros (eros) is the word
used in Greek for marital love; and when it is used in an ascetical context, it is used
deliberately, in contradistinction to Christian charity (agape). This Eros (eros) is an
operation of the desiring part of the soul according to nature, so that the soul desires—
purely, without disturbance of the flesh—God himself, but on an analogy with the Eros (eros)
that a bride feels for her husband. So we can see that these three parts of the soul have a
much broader significance than might nowadays be understood.

Moreover, when we talk about the governance of the soul by the mind (nous)—this will be
addressed at length—we need to understand that this is far more than living by some written
code of rules according to a narrow logical program.

All of these ideas find their expression in Christian living: the men who expressed them,
often clerics who frequently celebrated the Mysteries (sacraments), were active Christians
who did not see any gulf between the life in Christ and the ascetical psychology that they
were at great pains to discuss. While at times they might not refer specifically to Christ, it
must be understood that Christ was the centre of their lives: they were baptized Christians
who were speaking to Christians about the life in Christ, how to live it. We say this both
because some of the concepts, especially those adapted from pagan philosophy, might be
given by the reader a far narrower significance than the Christian author of the text being
discussed intends—above we mentioned the notion that the mind (nous) should govern the
other parts of the soul—and because, when we talk about the anthropology, the psychology,
the mysticism, of these men and women, it might seem that they are not saying anything
specifically Christian. Let us take as an example St Macrina. In her discussion up to this
point she has not based her arguments narrowly on Scripture. She came, however, from a
family that had suffered persecution for the sake of its faith in Jesus Christ and she would
have found it preposterous that someone might think that she were a pagan philosopher. St
Macrina is a Christian, indeed a Saint, and as a Christian she is discussing on her deathbed
Christian theology with her brother, St Gregory.
We will see cases where it is not clear that the discussion is authentically Christ-centred. In
these cases, it must be borne in mind who is speaking. These men and women had an
authentic Christian culture, even, in the case of Evagrius Pontikos, when they had fallen into
heresy.

Now let us commence the discussion.

[1] According to St Thomas Aquinas, Plato taught a multitude of souls. See Chapter IV.

[2] Arist–Physics.

[3] We ignore here certain of Evagrius’ cosmological and anthropological ideas which we will discuss in the next chapter

Chapter II -- 2

She, then, said: You yourself have sought this definition that has been discussed
in detail by many others already, whatever it is ever necessary to think these
things to be, the desiring part and the irascible part: either, united to the soul
(psuche) and from the first directly existing in its construction; or, being
something other than the soul and at a later time having become incident to us?

St Macrina is posing the fundamental question: are the irascible and desiring parts of the
soul, the temper and the desire, intrinsic to the nature of the soul and therefore to human
nature or are they something secondary that has been added to the soul? It should be borne
in mind that the Orthodox answer is not the same as the modern secular Western
understanding, nor the Protestant conception of man. These are basic issues in Christian
anthropology, and they have a far-reaching influence on the soteriology of the Christian who
believes in one or another model of man. Let us see what St Macrina is driving at:

On the one hand, that these things are to be seen in the soul is confessed by all
equally; on the other hand, reason has not yet found with precision a sure
understanding concerning these things, whatever it is necessary to think
concerning them, but most men still hesitate over various and deluded opinions
concerning these things. For us, however, it would be equally superfluous to put
forward the definition concerning the soul as a topic for discussion if indeed
the pagan philosophy which artfully discusses these matters were adequate for
a proof of the truth. Since, however, the theory concerning the soul proceeded
arbitrarily in those things which were according to the apparent chain of
reasoning, and [since] we, however, are without a share in this freedom—this
freedom, I say, to say whatever we wish—, having adopted Holy Scripture as the
law and as the rule of every dogma, looking at this matter, we necessarily accept
this alone: whatever, indeed, might be in agreement with the purpose of those
things that are written.

Note that the agreement is with the purpose of Scripture. There is a certain irony in the
treatment of the pagan philosophy of soul. The philosophers spoke freely according to the
apparent chain of reasoning. We must turn to the purpose of Scripture.

Therefore, passing by the Platonic chariot and the pair of foals yoked to it which
are not similarly disposed to each other in their impulsions, and the charioteer
which is over them, by means of all of which things, he [i.e. Plato] philosophizes
allegorically in regard to the things of this sort concerning the soul;

The two horses are the irascible and the desiring parts of the soul; these two parts of the soul
do not have similar drives. Over them is the reason or mind. This rejection of Plato cannot be
a rejection of the Platonic tripartite schema of the human soul since St Macrina retains it. It
is a rejection of the non-Christian elements in Plato’s handling of it. Moreover there is a
certain rhetorical device of drawing attention to something by claiming to pass over it in
silence that is in operation here.

and again as much as the philosopher after that one, who following artfully in
the things which appear and minutely examining with care those things which
now lie before us, pronounced by means of these things the soul to be mortal,

This is Aristotle.
‘Following artfully in the things which appear’: Reasoning based on sensible phenomena, the
Aristotelian philosophical method.

‘Pronounced the soul to be mortal’: This is interesting as a witness to a Fourth Century late
Classical interpretation of Aristotle. St Macrina reads Aristotle to pronounce the soul to be
mortal. Again, what is here rejected is whatever in St Macrina’s view is non-Christian. St
Macrina’s anthropology is indebted to Aristotle’s psychology, especially as concerns the
division of soul into vegetative, sensible and rational souls (plant, animal and human-
angelic). What St Macrina is doing is defining an eclectic—as regards philosophical
provenance—theory of the soul which in her view does justice to the revelation of Scripture
concerning the soul.

and abandoning all those before these and after them who philosophized in
prose or in a certain rhythm and metre, let us make the aim of our discussion
divinely-inspired Scripture which legislates that we must think nothing of the
soul to be special which is not also truly a property of the Divine Nature.

This is a profound statement. We might say that we are here at the heart of Macrinian
anthropology. For not only does this statement provide a criterion for deciding what is
natural to the soul, but it also has far-reaching consequences in any theory of virtue, in any
discussion of what is according to nature and what is contrary to nature in man—that is, as a
basis for the ascetical and mystical endeavour—and in human action—that is, in any theory
of ethics.

We would go so far as to say that this is the anthropology of the Orthodox Church. Let us
therefore look carefully at what is being asserted. St Macrina has rejected—as criteria, not as
fruitful sources—pagan thinkers. She has then turned to divinely-inspired Scripture and
singled out a principle and made it her own: this is the ‘according to the image (kat’ eikona)’
– ‘according to the likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’. As we have already remarked, St Gregory
nowhere in any of his writings makes explicit reference to the kath’ homoiosin. However, we
here have a complete statement of the principle. What belongs to human nature by nature is
precisely what God has as property.[1] As we have seen, this is in accordance with the
account of the creation of man in Genesis: ‘And God said, Let us make man according to our
image and likeness…’[2]

St Macrina will use the principle that whatever man has by nature as the image of God, God
himself has—we have already seen that in the creation of man the only difference between
the human soul and God was that man was created and God uncreated—first as a criterion to
establish that the mind (nous) is the image of God and that the irascible and desiring parts
are not intrinsic to the nature of man, and then to discuss the operations of the parts of the
soul according to nature and contrary to nature. For if what man has by nature is what is a
property of God, then the program for the Christian—any Christian, but especially the ascetic
—is to restore in himself the properties which he had by nature in Adam before Adam fell. To
this program St Gregory makes explicit reference in On the Making of Man. Hence, here we
implicitly find the distinction ‘according to the image (kat’ eikona)’ – ‘according to the
likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’, for the kath’ homoiosin is precisely the condition of likeness to
God, the condition of having reacquired in oneself the properties of God. The kat’ eikona is
the mind (nous), the image of God, which although Adam fell retains the potentiality of a
return to possessing the properties of God.[3]

There is one aspect of this theology which is ambiguous, that which St Macrina herself has
pointed out: is the image of God to be found only in the mind (nous) or also in the irascible
part and the desiring part when they operate according to nature? It is clear that St Macrina
and St Gregory take the position that the image is only in the mind (nous). However, it is also
clear that they envisage an operation according to nature for the other two parts of the soul
in the living person. The only question is this: in the Resurrection, will these two parts of the
soul, the temper and the desire, be present operating according to nature? Or will they have
been lost, as St Gregory seems to suggest? We ourselves do not wish to dogmatize.

The principle that by nature the soul of man when it was created had those properties which
God himself has gives full force to the words of our Lord: ‘Be ye therefore perfect as your
Heavenly Father is perfect.’[4] It turns the Sermon on the Mount, that summit of Christian
perfection, into an expression of those properties of God himself, both moral and spiritual,
which God himself calls on all Christians to emulate—and that not only in external behaviour
but in their very being.
St Macrina can make the statement that by nature man has exactly the same properties as
God because of her development of the ‘according to the image (kat’ eikona)’, where she
stated that man was created identical to God with the sole exception that man had a created
(and therefore finite) nature, whereas God is the uncreated and infinite Creator. Moreover,
elsewhere, St Macrina remarks that the properties of God are transmitted to man. Given her
emphasis on the created nature of man, this must be construed on the order of St Peter’s
‘partakers of the Divine Nature’.[5] (Remember, we are speaking of Paradise before the Fall,
and of the ascetical program of return to the condition that Adam and Eve had in Paradise
before the Fall.)

Now St Macrina has begun to centre her philosophy on this very likeness of man to God. This
provides her with a criterion of what is proper to man, and, as we remarked and shall see,
with a program of ascesis.

Let us continue:

For he who has said that the soul is a likeness of God has pronounced that
everything alien to God is outside the definition of the soul. For the similarity
would not be saved in those things which have been changed. Therefore, since
nothing of this sort [i.e. anger and desire] is contemplated together with the
Divine Nature, neither would one suggest that these things [i.e. anger and
desire] are united with the soul according to its definition.

A definition is a statement of the essence of a thing; it is not merely a pointer towards a

thing. Hence, for something to be excluded from the definition of the soul is for it to be
excluded from its nature or essence.

This is fundamental to Christian and Orthodox anthropology. What is a property of the

essence or inner nature of man is what is a property of God—except that man was created a
finite being. Hence, the dignity of man is very great: he is an icon of God. He was created in
the image of God. Through sin he lost the complete likeness to God. He is called to return to
being a complete likeness of God. This, of course, is divinization (theosis) and this is the
ascetical program.
It might again be remarked that the Gospel—and especially Christ’s death on the Cross, here
taken merely in its exemplary aspect without reference to its salvific aspect—is precisely a
statement of the properties of God. In other words, Christ’s actions, his words, his deeds, his
miracles, his commandments all manifest the properties of God, and it is these which
constitute Christian perfection, culminating in Christ’s death on the Cross: ‘Greater love than
this no man has, that he lay down his life on behalf of his friends.’[6] Hence, when the non-
Orthodox wonders ‘Well isn’t the concept of divinization (theosis) dangerous?’ we answer
‘No,’ because the Gospel manifests the unalterable properties of God that are the properties
of the divinized man. The divinized man is precisely he who has the perfection of Christ, who
laid down his life out of love. The divinized man is he who hears the parables of the Good
Shepherd and of the Good Samaritan, who obeys the precepts of the Gospel, which despises
self-exaltation and arrogance, that Gospel which says ‘He who exalts himself will be
humbled,’[7] and ‘Learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.’[8] Man never departs
from his weak and finite nature. Moreover, it will be seen that, ultimately, the virtues, which
are the perfections or excellences of the parts of the soul and which are the properties of God,
are transmitted to man by the Grace of God, by the Holy Spirit.

Let us continue:

Let us also excuse ourselves from establishing our dogmas according to the art
of dialectic by means of syllogistic and analytical science, as being rotten and
suspect in the demonstration of the truth, discourse of such a sort; for it is
apparent to all that the dialectical meticulousness has equal power for each
thing: towards the overthrow of the truth and also towards the condemnation
of the lie. Whence we often hold even the very truth to be suspect when it is
brought forth with a certain skill of this sort, as if the severity in regard to these
things were misleading our intellect (dianoia) and failing to reach the truth. If,
then, one were to admit an uncontrived argument that was naked of every
covering, we will speak, as far as it might be possible, according to the chain of
the scriptural narrative, introducing the contemplation concerning these
things.

What is it, therefore, that we are saying? This rational animal, man, is borne
witness to even by those who are outside our doctrine, that he is receptive of
perception and scientific knowledge, and this definition would not thus trace
out our nature if it indeed viewed anger and desire and all the such-like as being
consubstantial with our nature. For in regard to something else, one would not
at all render the definition of the subject stating the common property instead
of the peculiar property. For since the desiring part and the irascible part are
seen in both the irrational and the rational nature equally, one would not
reasonably characterize the peculiar property from the common property.
What then is redundant and worthless towards the outline of the nature—how
is it to have force as part of the nature towards the overthrow of the definition?
For every definition of an essence looks towards the peculiar property of the
subject.

This seems to be a logical fallacy. In both Platonic and Aristotelian terms, it is suspect. The
Platonic and Aristotelian method of definition is essentially hierarchical: Man is an animal.
[9] But in Platonic and Aristotelian definitions, what is subsumed as species under a generic
category necessarily contains the properties of that generic category.[10] Hence, man has all
the properties that characterize an animal, not just those which are peculiar to him, namely
mind (nous) and understanding. All living beings are alive vegetatively. Hence, so is man.
Some also have a sensible soul. Man is in this group, so he also has a sensible soul. A subset
of the living beings with a vegetative and a sensible soul also has mind (nous). This group has
one member—man. But, in both Platonic and Aristotelian terms, while it is true that mind
(nous) is the peculiar property of man, it is not true that the sensible and vegetative souls are
irrelevant to his essence. They are a part of man also—part of his logical pedigree. Now, it
may be ontologically correct, in accordance with Revelation,[11] that men will lose in the
Resurrection their sensible and vegetative souls. But one cannot construct a logical proof of
this based on Platonic dialectic or Aristotelian logic.

As rendered by her brother, St Macrina views the peculiar property as an expression of the
essence of the subject. This may be equivalent to the reason (logos) of the subject, the logos
which in the wisdom of God is as it were the model of the subject. In this case, St Macrina
would be correct: all other aspects of the subject would be incidental, contingent, accidental.
In this case also, there would be no hierarchical structuring: the essences would be
ontologically separate, and hierarchical relationships among them would be inferential, the
work of man, and contingent. This is neither Platonic dialectic nor Aristotelian ontology. It
might be a more Stoic or Neoplatonic approach to essence.

Let us continue:

Whatever might be outside that which is peculiar is disregarded as alien to the

definition. But, certainly, that the operation according to anger and desire is
common to all the irrational nature is admitted. Every common property is not
the same as the peculiar property. It is therefore necessary by means of these
arguments to consider that those things in which human nature is especially
characterized are not in these things [i.e. anger and desire]. But just as, seeing
the perceptive and nutritive and growing aspects in us,

These three terms refer to the quality of having sense-perception (‘perceptive’), characteristic
of the animal soul, and to the quality of having nutrition and growth (‘nutritive and
growing’), characteristic of the vegetative soul. St Macrina will come to ascribe anger and
desire to the animal soul in man. What she is saying is that just as in man the quality of
having sense-perception and the quality of having nutrition and growth do not damage the
definition of the soul of man that she has given, so the existence in man of the anger and
desire does not damage that definition of the soul that she has given.

one does not abolish through these things the definition concerning the soul
which has been rendered—for it is not true that because this thing is in the soul,
that thing is not—thus also he who comprehends the movements of our nature
in regard to anger and desire would not reasonably battle against the definition
[we have given], as indicating the nature [of the soul] in a defective way.

As we have said, as a Platonic or Aristotelian argument, this seems fallacious.

I said to the teacher: What therefore must be known concerning these things?
For I am not yet able to perceive how it is proper to make separate those things
which exist in us, as alien to our nature.
Whatever the merits of her logic, St Macrina now introduces the subject of our work:

She said: You see that it is a sort of battle of the thought against these things

This is the heart of the matter, this ascetical ‘battle of the thought against these things’; and
the rest of this work is a study of how this is done, according to St Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius
Pontikos and St Hesychios. As we have already seen, this ‘battle of the thought’ against anger
and desire has its roots in Classical Greek philosophy, in Stoic asceticism. It even has its
roots in Plato’s own asceticism. It is utterly important to grasp, however, that in the authors
with which we shall deal, the basis of the ascetical ‘battle of the thought against these things’
is the tripartite soul.

However, we again encounter an ambiguity: In Evagrius and in St Hesychios, the ‘battle of

the thought’ is against the operations contrary to nature of the temper and desire, taken as
parts of the soul, not against the temper and desire per se. Hence, when we ourselves, as
authors of this work, say that the battle is against these things in thought, we mean that the
ascetical battle is against the operations contrary to nature of the temper and desire, as
expressed in our thoughts. As rendered by her brother, St Macrina wants to go further, and
eliminate completely from the definition—from the essence—of the soul, the temper and
desire. In fact, we will find that Evagrius, despite his orientation of the return of these parts
of the soul to their operation according to nature, also takes the position in his own
heterodox cosmology that these two parts of the soul are not of the essence of man. [12]
Moreover, St Thomas Aquinas, evidently relying on St Augustine’s Neoplatonizing
anthropology, also takes the position that the temper and the desire are not the distinctly
human parts of man, although he treats them in a more naturalistic way than St Macrina.[13]
However, St Macrina’s own program to eliminate the temper and desire from the definition
of the soul, and not merely their operations contrary to nature, proceeds somewhat
ambiguously: while her theoretical discussion proceeds along the lines we have indicated,
her examples are of operations of the temper and desire contrary to nature.

and exertion to isolate the soul from these things insofar as it might be possible.
And there are some at least in whom this exertion is accomplished
This exertion or zeal is something that one makes an effort at; it is not something that
happens by itself. That is what ascesis is.

just as we hear in regard to Moses, that that man was greater than temper
(thumos) and desire (epithumia),

Note that the fundamental psychological structure of the soul is mind (nous) – temper
(thumos) – desire (epithumia). We will not depart from this model. That is, the Greek
Fathers maintain this model and the Philokalia is founded on it. Hence, two things are
important: First, to understand this model very well—especially where we might be inclined
to overlay it with a popular or received Freudian or Jungian or other depth-psychological
model—so that we understand how the Fathers thought, how they grasped the human being,
including the ascetical endeavour. Second, to grasp that whatever the merits of a Freudian or
Jungian or similar model, the Fathers do not use such a model: we will make no endeavour
to reinterpret neptic theology[14] in the light of modern psychology; we do not know what
fruit, if any, such an endeavour would bear. The author of this commentary has met
accomplished practitioners of mental prayer; and while they showed a willingness—
sometimes moderate—to make use of modern psychiatry and its medicaments to assist
troubled monks and laymen, the author has never seen an interest on their part in recasting
Orthodox psychology, as it is being elaborated by St Macrina and the other authors we will
discuss, so as to bring it into line with modern psychology of any school whatsoever.

The psychology we are about to elaborate places a great emphasis on the intention, or choice,
of man. St Macrina has used the words, ‘battle’ and ‘endeavour’ (or, ‘zeal’). While it will be
seen that the person has tendencies contrary to nature (passions), that dreams reveal the
state of the person,[15] a fundamental paradigm in the psychology we are about to delineate
is this: on the basis of a thought, a person has the free choice to accept to do what the
thought suggests or not to accept to do it. In this psychology, man is an agent who can choose
to do one of two things: he is an agent who can act on an impulse or resist it. In this, the
Greek Fathers are very close both to the Gospel (‘Repent for the Kingdom of God is at
hand,’[16] implies that the man being called to repentance has the capacity to choose his
course of action) and to Aristotle, who sets free and deliberate action as the ground of ethical
conduct. Modern psychology has bequeathed to the popular understanding a tendency to
think that man is incapable, because of his unconscious drives, of free and deliberate choice.
It may well be that the popular understanding—curiously fatalistic—is a misunderstanding
and that in the depth-psychological systems the psychologically mature man is he who, freed
from bondage to his unconscious complexes, is capable of making free and deliberate
choices. We do not know. In neptic theology, however, the monk is supposed by the Fathers
to be able to make a free choice: to accept a thought and to act on it, or to reject the thought
and not to act on it. Only a seriously deranged man would be considered incapable, as out of
his senses, of free and deliberate choice, although the Fathers certainly recognize
intermediate cases where a man’s freedom of choice is strong except where one or another
passion dominates his ability to make a free choice of his course of action. Moreover, where
psychologists today might speak of unconscious drives, the Fathers speak of a soul that has
mind (nous), temper (thumos) and desire (epithumia). They never depart from this
structure; hence every unconscious drive, in modern parlance, has to be interpreted in terms
of this structure: it has to belong to one of these three parts of the soul. Evagrius Pontikos
spends much time discussing how what we today might call unconscious drives can be fit
into a typology which is in turn dovetailed into this tripartite structure. That is what this
work is about—that and how to pray, given this psychological structure and this
understanding of human nature.

the [biblical] history bearing witness to him in regard to both, that he was meek
more than all men (the lack of wrath and the alienation from anger are
indicated by the meekness)

Note the significance of meekness: it is not sentimental, not a sweetness, but the state of
being free of the passion we call anger. Let us pose the following question: does St Macrina
mean here that Moses was free of the passions of anger and desire? Or that he was free of the
irascible and desiring parts of the soul? What is the difference? A passion is an operation or
tendency of a part of the soul contrary to nature. Hence, what we are asking is whether St
Macrina means that Moses was free of operations and tendencies of the irascible and
desiring parts of the soul contrary to nature or whether she means that he was free of the
irascible and desiring parts of the soul, pure and simple. Given that St Macrina has insisted
that the irascible and desiring parts of the soul are not part of the definition, not part of the
essence, of the soul, she seems to mean the latter. In that case, meekness would be construed
here to mean an absence of the irascible part of the soul. However, she will later discuss the
operation of the irascible and desiring parts of the soul according to nature. Moreover, we
will find in Evagrius Pontikos in Volume II that meekness is treated not as an absence of the
irascible part of the soul, but both as a therapy of that part of the soul and as a virtue, as an
operation of that part of the soul according to nature.

and that he did not desire any of those things in regard to which in most men we
see the desiring part set in operation

Again, does St Macrina mean that Moses no longer had a desiring part of his soul or that the
desiring part of his soul operated only according to nature?

which very thing would not occur if these things were nature and were to be
referred to the definition of the essence [of the soul], for it is not possible for
him who has come to be outside nature to remain in being.

This is very important. First, however, let us clarify the last clause. What St Macrina is saying
is that if Moses alienates a property from himself without ceasing to exist, it cannot be
construed to be an attribute of his essence; and since Moses himself demonstrates that he
was free both of anger and of desire, without for all that ceasing to exist, then those two
things cannot be construed to be essential parts of Moses’—or anyone else’s—soul. Here it
seems clear that St Macrina means that the irascible and desiring parts of the soul are not
part of the essence of man: it is not merely a matter of the operations contrary to nature of
those parts of the soul, not merely a matter of the passions. We ourselves have some
reservations about this formulation, which St Macrina herself will shortly modify. While we
do not wish to dogmatize on whether the irascible and desiring parts of the soul are or are
not intrinsic to the nature of man, we do take the view that the ascetical endeavour is not a
matter of removing these parts of the soul, but of returning them from an operation contrary
to nature to an operation according to nature: we see that there are virtues which pertain to
these parts of the soul, and that the ascetical program is to remove the passions and acquire
the virtues of these parts of the soul. We think that this approach is consistent with the
spirituality of the Philokalia.

We are here at the heart of ascetical psychology. We have a tripartite structure of the soul; we
are going to free (or, cure) the soul from being dominated by the passions of two parts, anger
and desire. Evagrius will mention that the mind (nous) is subject to its own passions of
ignorance and delusion, although he does not call them ‘passions’.

Now, the important thing is this: the ascetical program is being set: we are to free ourselves
from anger and desire—in what sense, we will see as we proceed. It should be understood
that both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment rejected this program—
vehemently. They do not accept the underlying anthropology and soteriology. This is the
significance of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith: a rejection of the ascetical theology
that is based on the anthropology that we are discussing. The Enlightenment, of course, went
further, rejecting revealed religion; we saw this in the last chapter. In the West, only the
Roman Catholic Church, until our own day, maintained, in its religious orders, this
understanding. Here we see a fundamental point on which the Orthodox Church maintains a
stance foreign to the wisdom of the West today. It is the Orthodox Church’s understanding of
human nature and of the goal of the Christian: what the Christian does from the time of his
conversion to Christ, from the time of his Baptism, until he dies.

But, truly, Moses was in being (einai) and was not in these things. Therefore,
these things are something other than nature, and not nature, for the true
nature is identical to that in which the being (einai) of the substance is
comprehended. However, alienation from these things lies within our power, as
not only undamaging but as even beneficial to our nature, the disappearance of
such things. It is therefore manifest that these things are among those things
which are looked upon [as coming] from outside [human nature], being
passions or affections (pathe) of nature and not substance (ousia)—for the
substance (ousia) is whatever it is.

It seems to the many that anger is a boiling of the blood that surrounds the
heart; to others it seems to be an appetite to sorrow in turn him who has
previously struck one. As we might understand it, anger is an impulse to
distress him who has provoked one. None of these things occur in the definition
of the soul.
And if we define desire by itself, we will say that it is an appetite for what is
lacking; or a yearning for the enjoyment of pleasure; or sorrow for that which
satisfies us but which is not in our power; or a certain relation towards the
pleasurable, the enjoyment of which is not present. For all these things and
other things of the same sort manifest desire; however, they do not apply to the
definition of the soul.

But also as many other things as are viewed in regard to the soul, those things
which are seen in opposition to each other, such as cowardice and over-
boldness, sorrow and pleasure, fear and contempt, and as many things of this
sort, each of which is considered to be disposed in relation to the desiring part
and the irascible part but which outlines its own nature with a proper
definition. For over-boldness and contempt intimate a certain manifestation of
the irascible impulse, whereas the relation which occurs in the matter of
cowardice and fear intimates a reduction and diminution of this very same
impulse.

Let us look at what is being said. First however, let us remark on what St Macrina appears to
understand by anger and desire. Her examples here are of operations of the irascible and
desiring parts of the soul contrary to nature; she even goes so far as to include examples such
as cowardice and fear which intimate a deficiency in the proper exercise of the irascible part
according to nature. Hence, although her theoretical exposition suggests that she is talking
about the parts of the soul and not about the operations contrary to nature of the parts of the
soul, her examples indicate that, in fact, she is talking about the operations contrary to
nature of those parts of the soul. Let us now turn to look at what is being said.

Moses was free of anger and desire: Moses is a model of the completed ascetic, he who has
arrived at the goal. Hence, the goal of every Christian—for the ascetic is merely he who
dedicates himself fully to the attainment of the Christian goal—is to free himself from anger
and desire. Evagrius dwells much on this, and we will see much more of it in the writings of
Evagrius that we discuss in Volume II. And in Volume III we will use St Hesychios—based in
great part on Evagrius—to approach this matter from the standpoint of prayer.
Now what St Macrina is asserting is that since Moses was free of anger and desire and yet did
not cease to be Moses, a man, then anger and desire cannot be part of the essence of man.
We might object that a man with one leg or hand is still a man, but that a normal man has
two legs or hands. While it is true that this implies that in St Macrina’s view having two legs
or hands is not part of the essence of man, a Christian who does not share Orthodox ascetical
theology might similarly argue that anger and desire are normal parts of human nature. After
all, the Orthodox Church esteems chastity freely undertaken for God whereas many
Christians would view it as a unscriptural aberration. We say this to indicate the seriousness
of what is here being asserted by St Macrina. Taking her to say that it is necessary for the
ascetic to remove the passions of the irascible and desiring parts of the soul, to remove their
operations contrary to nature, then we have a certain attitude towards those very passions,
an attitude that many non-Orthodox Christians, and many non-Christians, do not share.
Moreover, we view the difference between the Orthodox doctrine and the non-Orthodox
doctrines that would be opposed to it as being fundamental aspects of different
anthropologies, different images of the person in each of those doctrines. Moreover, those
different anthropologies are tied to different soteriologies, different doctrines of what
salvation is and how it is to be accomplished or attained.

We are here at the root of Orthodox anthropology, and any attempt to recast Orthodox
prayer of the basis of another anthropology—perhaps a modern post-Enlightenment or post-
Freudian or post-Jungian psychological system, or even a Protestant or Roman Catholic
anthropology—is going to produce a man or monk quite different from the traditional
Orthodox man or monk if the attempt does not respect this fundamental structure of
Orthodox anthropology. In other words, an attempt to break off the methods of Hesychasm
and plant them in a different philosophical or theological setting that does not respect the
basic orientation of Orthodox anthropology is going to produce results quite different from
those which are produced in the Orthodox ascetical tradition.

Note that nothing is said here by St Macrina about prayer, about union with the Godhead,
about surrender to the Godhead, about the ‘oceanic’. The basic schema is this: image of God
– Fall – return to image of God taken as freedom from anger and desire. There is more to it,
as we shall see, but it is well to grasp these fundamental schematic structures; they are as it
were the floor plan of the house.
One might object: ‘Is it so simple that freeing yourself from anger and desire is enough to
return you to the image of God that Adam had in Paradise?’ Here, again, since we have a
tripartite structure of the soul (mind – temper – desire), all psychological phenomena have
to be subsumed under one or another part. There is no concept of an unconscious per se, no
other part of the soul lying about that will provide a receptacle for the classification of
psychological phenomena. Hence, freeing yourself from anger and desire is a very big
program indeed; it does not just mean not killing your neighbour and not desiring his wife; it
is a very broad endeavour.

Now the next thing that St Macrina says is that it lies within our power—she is a Christian—
to alienate ourselves from these things, and that doing so not only does not do damage to
human nature but is even beneficial to it. Therefore, she says, these things must be viewed as
things which come from outside human nature. That is, anger and desire are extrinsic to
human nature. This is a fundamental point in Christian ascetical theology when we
understand by anger and desire the operations contrary to nature of the irascible and
desiring parts of the soul. The passions of anger and desire, taken to be very broad categories
of subjective psychological experience and motivations to action, are not part of our human
nature. They come from outside. They are affections—passions (pathe). And here St Macrina
has introduced a fundamental point: what a passion is. A passion (pathos) is an affection,
something that occurs to one. Later, St Macrina will use the metaphor of warts. Just as
someone who has a wart is disfigured—affected—by his wart, so we are affected by anger and
desire. They are not part of our human nature. If this is so, and it is, then our program must
be a return in Christ Jesus our Lord to our kata phusin condition—our condition according
to nature—free from these affections or passions. This is our ascetical endeavour. We will see
that this return is to the condition that Adam had in Paradise before the Fall—to dispassion
(apatheia), here taken in a broad sense; we will see that Evagrius uses the term more
restrictedly. Moreover, we will see that because of Christ’s Ascension, we are enabled to
return not only to the condition that Adam had before the Fall, but to ascend with Christ to
the right hand of the Father—through Christ’s own Ascension, which was the ascension of
our human nature in the human nature of Jesus Christ: as God, Jesus Christ, was and is one
with the Father always.

St Macrina will clarify later what the passions are. We are now, however, beginning to see the
fundamental outline of the ascetical endeavour.
‘For the substance (ousia) is whatever it is.’: As St Macrina has pointed out, the soul (psuche)
or mind (nous) is not susceptible of a complete definition. Being the image of God, who is
unknowable in his essence, it also is unknowable in its essence.

St Macrina defines anger and desire; it is well to remember that to the Classical Greek
imbued with the notions of nature, essence and truth, a definition was a characterization of
the essence of the thing defined. Nowadays, we define something in any way that we find
convenient, making no attempt to characterize the essence of the thing. Hence the
importance for her discussion of St Macrina’s definitions of anger and desire. Moreover, that
is why her statement that the definitions of anger and desire do not apply to the definition of
the soul is a statement that anger and desire have nothing to do with the essence of the soul.

[1] The notion of properties that adhere in a substance, here God, is of course Aristotelian.

[9] Here, ‘animal’ is taken to mean ‘living being with sense-perception’, not ‘just another irrational animal’.

[10] This is logical inclusion: the species is a logical subset of the genus, and must necessarily possess all the attributes
of the genus.

[11] See Luke 20, 34–6, although we would not want to insist that that passage implies or does not imply this.

[12] We will see this in Chapter III, below. Since it is known that all the Cappadocian Fathers were influenced by Origen,
it is reasonable to suppose that as author St Gregory betrays in the formulation here an influence of the Origenist
doctrine of the descent of the mind (nous) to being in a body.

[14] That is, the theology of the Philokalia; ‘neptic’ literally means ‘sober’.

Chapter II -- 3

Now St Macrina proceeds to look at the Aristotelian schema of the virtues, which is that of a
mean between two extremes.[1] First, St Macrina asserts that all such pairs of extremes
defined in opposition the one to the other (over-boldness – cowardice; pleasure – sorrow;
contempt – fear; and so on) have to do with the irascible part of the soul or with the desiring
part. Moreover, each member of a pair is either an excess or a deficiency of an impulse of
anger or desire. Cowardice is a deficiency of the same impulse of which over-boldness is an
excess; similarly for the other pairs. Each pair refers to a specific impulse—defined
intrinsically by the pair of terms, which pair reflects the observation of human behaviour—
and one member is an excess, the other a deficiency, of that impulse. But in each term of a
pair, St Macrina is referring to an operation of the irascible part or of the desiring part of the
soul contrary to nature, whether or not the operation described by the term is an excess or
deficiency.

Sorrow, however, from both anger and desire has its raw materials: the
relaxation of anger in the incapacity to defend oneself against those who have
previously sorrowed one becomes sorrow; and the despair of those things
which are desired and the deprivation of those things which are dear to one
works this dejected disposition in the intellect (dianoia).

It is important to grasp this. St Macrina is beginning a model analysis of human behaviour

and introspective experience—we might call it her model psychological analysis. As we have
already pointed out, these schemas are fundamental for a comprehension of mental prayer in
the heart. We have three parts of the soul, the mind (nous), the irascible part (or, temper)
and the desiring part (or, desire). We must account for human behaviour and introspective
experience—in prayer, even—using these three concepts. We here have our first examples.
Evagrius will deepen the analysis and situate prayer in its context; St Hesychios will
introduce mental prayer in the heart, using the Jesus Prayer, but making use of Evagrius’
analysis.[2] We need, in the present example, to account for sorrow, a fundamental concept.

What is sorrow?

According to St Macrina, sorrow has its raw materials—its starting-points—in both the
irascible part and the desiring part of the soul. Informally, this means that sorrow has its
starting-points either in the passions related to anger or in the passions related to desire.
Since the only other part of the soul available is the mind (nous), and St Macrina is not
suggesting that sorrow has its starting-points in the operations of the mind (nous), then we
have an exhaustive analysis: there is no unconscious; there are no other parts of the soul to
provide starting-points for sorrow. This is important: sorrow has to be assigned somewhere,
to the mind (nous), to the irascible part or to the desiring part; there is nowhere else it can be
pigeon-holed. The mind (nous) is out; it is the image of God. Observing ourselves and others,
we see in ourselves and in others that we are sorrowed in three cases: First, when we are
unable to defend ourselves against those who have angered us: thwarted anger breeds
sorrow. Second, when we cannot attain that which we desire: thwarted desire breeds sorrow.
Third, when we are deprived of that which is dear to us: deprivation of what is loved breeds
sorrow.

This analysis affords us a means of approaching the therapy of the passion of sorrow, here
taken as a condition of being sad in a way contrary to nature. Are you sorrowful? You should
not be. Sorrow is not a Christian ascetical virtue. (This is an extremely important matter.)
Hence, you must work to free yourself of this sorrow. But the method depends on the cause,
and we have isolated the three basic causes: thwarted anger, thwarted desire and deprivation
of what is loved. In your case, you must assess which cause is responsible for your sorrow
and act accordingly. Thwarted anger has a different therapy from the other two, which are
matters of desire.[3]

We here see the basic structure of the psychological analysis. This is the structure of
psychological analysis that Evagrius uses. It formed the basis of the Christian asceticism of
the Middle Ages. Only in our day, in the West, has it been replaced in the religious orders by
modern psychology. We leave the reader to judge whether the change has improved things.

To continue:

And that which is seen in opposition to sorrow, I mean the sickness that is
related to pleasure, is similarly distributed to anger and to desire. For pleasure
rules each of these two equally.

That is to say: We have taken one passion, sorrow, and we have analysed its causes. Now we
look at its polar opposite, pleasure, also a passion, and see that it too is connected to both
anger and desire. Since these polar opposites are based on excesses and deficiencies of the
same impulse (or, here, impulses), we should expect the same structure for pleasure,
although St Macrina does not go into detail, namely: anger achieved (I have revenged myself
on him who have sorrowed me; surely we all know the pleasure that comes from revenge);
desire achieved (the classic form of pleasure); and retention or reunion with that which is
loved. Note that following the form of analysis given for sorrow, we separate the two forms of
pleasure based on desire; hence, we still have three forms of pleasure: anger achieved, desire
achieved, and retention of or reunion with the beloved. Pleasure is called a sickness by St
Macrina. Hence it needs treatment. But its treatment—its therapy—will depend on its cause.
The pleasure that the ascetic takes in hatred is different from the pleasure that he takes in
the achievement of desire, and the therapies correspondingly different. Again, this is where
Evagrius’ analyses will play a definitive role. Now let us continue:

All these things indeed are around the soul and are not the soul,

St Macrina identifies, as she says elsewhere, the soul (psuche) with the mind (nous). In his
own ascetical system, Evagrius will discuss passions of the mind (nous).

but of the nature of some warts that sprout from the intellectual (dianoetikon)
part of the soul.

This is basic to the concept of affection or passion (pathos), and hence to the whole ascetical
endeavour in the way that St Macrina is now formulating it.

Which warts are thought to be parts of the soul since they have clung to it, but
they are not that which the soul (psuche) is according to its essence.

St Macrina will modify this concept in a moment, but let us look at it very carefully: it is
important in its own right. St Macrina identifies the soul with the mind (nous) as the soul’s
essence or substance—what it really is. The other parts of the soul—really, the operations
contrary to nature of the other parts of the soul, as her examples have indicated—she is
treating as warts, things which have happened to or occurred to the soul seen in its true
essence: these are the passions connected with anger and desire. This typology exhausts, as
we have pointed out, all psychological phenomena.[4]

This model implies that the ascetic’s goal is to remove completely the affections or passions
(pathe)—the warts—from his mind (nous). St Macrina has said that the soul (psuche) or
mind (nous) is incomprehensible according to its essence, just as God is incomprehensible
according to his essence; and that the mind (nous) has the properties that God has with the
exception that the mind (nous) is created and God uncreated. Hence, the ascetic in removing
the warts uncovers the true essence of his soul (psuche), his mind (nous), the image of God.

Note that nothing is said here by St Macrina about the role of grace either as assisting the
ascetic or as having previously restored in Baptism the image of God that is the soul (psuche)
or mind (nous), the essence of the soul that is to be uncovered from the warts of the passions.
This should not be construed to be Pelagian, but as an undeveloped matter: St Gregory of
Nyssa in other writings addresses such matters. Most likely this whole development of the
passions as warts on the true nature of the soul (psuche) or mind (nous) reflects the
influence of Plotinus, an influence which either St Macrina or St Gregory has not completely
thought through and assimilated into Christianity.[5] Evagrius in his own system will posit
that once the irascible part and the desiring part of the soul have been restored to their
operation according to nature then the ascetic can begin to restore the mind (nous) to its
condition according to nature through contemplation and gnosis; this culminates in mystical
union with God.[6] However, he also has an isolated remark that coincides with St Macrina’s
model of the passions as warts. In this, it is well to consider that he comes out of the circle of
the Cappadocians. The remark is part of Scholia on Ecclesiastes 15:

He says: ‘He gave to them the Age also,’ [cf. Eccl. 3, 2] that is, the reasons (logoi)
of the Age. For this is the Kingdom of the Heavens which the Lord said that we
have within us [cf. Luke 17, 21], which, being covered by the passions, is not
found by men.[7]

In any event, we here have a model wherein the ascetical removal of the warts leads to a
recovery of the image of God that Adam retained after the Fall covered with the warts of the
passions. The passions are here seen as uniformly negative and undesirable. It is in this
context that we should reflect on St Gregory’s next objection:
[1] Although this schema of the virtues is associated with Aristotle, it in fact first makes its appearance in Plato’s
writings.

[2] We will leave Evagrius’ deeper analysis until we comment on his works in Volume II.

[3] These therapies Evagrius discusses in the works we comment on in Volume II.

[4] We will encounter memory and dreams as separate categories; and Evagrius will discuss the significance of the
memory, and dreams and dream-like phenomena.

Chapter II -- 4

But I said to the virgin: But we indeed see in the virtuous not a little
contribution occurring towards the better from these things [i.e. the passions].
For the praise in the case of [the Prophet] Daniel was desire [cf. Dan. 9, 23; 10,
11; 10, 19]; and Phineas appeased God with his anger [cf. Num. 25, 11]; and we
have learned that fear is the beginning of wisdom [cf. Prov. 9, 10; Ps. 110, 10];
and we have heard from Paul that the end of the sorrow which is according to
God is salvation [cf. 2 Cor. 7, 10]; and the Gospel legislates that we should hold
dire things in contempt [cf. Luke 21, 12–19]—and not to fear terror is nothing
other than the outline of courage, which very thing is reckoned by wisdom
among good things. Therefore, by means of these things the argument shows
that such things as these must not be deemed to be passions (pathe). For the
passions would not be taken up together towards the accomplishment of virtue.

What is St Gregory advocating? Is he advocating a mean in the use of pleasure or anger or

revenge? No. The Greek Fathers are universal in their condemnation of the passions taken as
the operations of the irascible part and the desiring part contrary to nature; this is perhaps
why the Fathers are not acceptable to the sensually minded. There is no imputed justification
here, no doctrine of the mean in the use of passion as might be found in a theological
approach to the passions based on Aristotelian ethics. In the case of the passion of pleasure,
there is no divergence here from the Pauline doctrine: ‘It is well that a man not touch a
woman,’[1] and ‘For I want all men to be as I also am [i.e. continent], but each one has his
own proper charism from God, one, then, in this fashion, one, then, in that fashion,’[2] and
‘But it is better to marry than to be aflame,’[3] and ‘He who marries does well; but he who
does not marry does better.’[4] This is the doctrine of the Church, and the Greek Fathers
were continent and speaking to monks, who had committed themselves to the ‘good part’.[5]
They were discussing the best: the restoration of the image of God that man had in Paradise
in Adam and Eve. Hence, what St Gregory is attacking in the passage above is the notion that
all the passions are really warts: some of the passions evidently have a positive role to play in
the accomplishment of virtue, which by St Macrina’s definition is nothing more or less than
the restoration of the image of God that Adam had in Paradise. We will see that those
passions which have a positive role to play are precisely the operations according to nature of
the irascible and desiring parts of the soul. St Macrina will accept this analysis of the
operations of the parts of the soul according to and contrary to nature immediately below,
although she will continue to assert that even though the irascible and desiring parts of the
soul have operations according to nature, those parts of the soul are not intrinsic to the
nature of man.

And the teacher said: I suppose that I have provided the cause of this sort of
confusion of thoughts, not having clarified the argument concerning this thing
so that a certain attendant order be imposed on the contemplation. Now,
therefore, insofar as it is possible, a certain order will be contrived for the
subject of discussion, so that such oppositions might for us no longer have
place, the contemplation progressing through a logical sequence.

What St Macrina is now going to say is worthy of our greatest attention and reflection.

For we say that the contemplative and discriminative and overseeing–existing–

things faculty which the soul has is proper and according to nature in it, and
that by means of these things the soul saves in itself the image of the deiform
Grace (since reason also conjectures that the Divine, whatever it is according to
its Nature, is in these things: to oversee all things and to discriminate the good
from the worse).
We apologize for the unidiomatic translation of this passage, which we will now analyse
minutely because of its significance. St Macrina says that the soul has a power which has
three attributes: contemplative (theoretiken) and discriminating (diakritiken) and
overseeing (epoptiken)–existing–things.

In accordance with the spirit of the day, the Nineteenth Century English translator, Moore,
renders ‘contemplative’ as ‘speculative’,[6] as does the modern French translator, Terrieux.
[7] This is surely an error, and the error is important. ‘Speculative’ is an intellectual idea; it
refers to the formulation of ideas, thoughts, theories,[8] the use of words and so forth.
‘Speculative’ is an intellectual concept foreign to the sense of a St Gregory or a St Macrina,
who were mystics. The sense here is of an intuitive cognition of the truth, [9] which
ultimately is he who said ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’[10] This is important, for
without this correction of sense, the reader will no longer grasp the connection with what
Evagrius Pontikos is going to describe when he, Evagrius, addresses the three types of
contemplation: the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of existent things, the
contemplation of angels, and the contemplation of God himself.[11]

It is true that the dictionary gives ‘speculative’ as a possible meaning of theoretikos.[12]

However, let us maintain our point:[13] what St Macrina is referring to is not the intellectual
power of the soul—the intellect (dianoia), which she earlier defined as an operation
(energeia) of the mind (nous) and which is the power of ratiocination—but the power of the
soul to apprehend truth directly.

The second attribute that St Macrina posits for the faculty of the soul is the ‘discriminative’.
As will be evident in her discourse immediately following, St Macrina here intends the ability
to discern the good from the worse. This places her squarely in the camp of the intuitionists
in ethics: recall that for Hume, the moral judgement was a matter of a sentiment of approval
or disapproval. We remarked in our discussion of Hume that his theory was weak. This is
why: St Macrina has distinguished the ability to discriminate right from wrong as an
intuitive operation of the mind (nous)—not as a spontaneous operation of the irascible part
or the desiring part of the soul!—and has asserted that this is one of the three things that
preserve the image of God in man. Hume rejected the past in his theory of man and asserted
that the mind was nothing more than a ‘bundle’ of impressions (sense-perceptions, passions
and emotions) and ideas (mental images of sense-perceptions, passions and emotions
connected by association in time, place or appearance). Given his impoverished theory of
mind, Hume had nowhere else to go in his theory of ethics but to the emotions for a
foundation of his ethics—that and the utility for man and for society of moral behaviour.
Note also the difference between the tripartite model derived ultimately from Plato that St
Macrina is using and the two-part model—belief versus passion, desire or sentiment—that
Hume is using.

This position of St Macrina is extremely important, for it sets ethics on an intuitive

foundation.[14] There is nothing here of an intellectualistic or rationalistic theory that would
posit reason in the sense of ratiocination as the foundation of moral judgement; nor is there
an emotive theory such as Hume’s. This is not to say that moral judgements cannot be
discussed rationally; it is to say that moral judgement is not essentially a matter of syllogistic
reasoning. Nor is it to say that we do not have spontaneous emotional reactions to the
behaviour of others; it is to say that those emotional reactions are not the ultimate basis of
our moral judgements. Of course, a critic might disparage this intuitive moral judgement as
mere emotional judgement-making, losing completely and intentionally the spiritual
dimension. Here we have a faculty found in the soul that discriminates the good from the
worse: moral judgement is a spiritual matter. Moreover this faculty preserves the image of
God in man. We will say more about this below.

The third attribute does not translate easily. We have tortured English to come up with
‘overseeing–existing–things’. We are translating ‘ton onton epoptiken’. St Gregory is a
careful stylist. He has retained an adjectival form in his phrase; he wants to convey that these
are aspects of a single power of the soul, not powers in the sense of faculties. The word,
epoptiken, is an adjective that means ‘overseeing’ and it conveys the experience of conscious
reality. It corresponds exactly to Descartes’ revelation to himself, ‘Cogito ergo sum,’ without
that ratiocinative aspect being included that forms the basis of Cartesian speculation. In
other words, we start from the same experience as Descartes, self-conscious awareness of
ourselves, but without proceeding in an intellectualistic and rationalistic way as did
Descartes. We remain intellectually intuitive, not intellectually rationalistic: the reason is an
operation of the mind (nous); what we are discussing is prior to the use of reason. This is
very important, for in practising mental prayer in the heart, the ascetic will perforce enter
into ‘states of consciousness’ wherein his consciousness will easily be seen by him to contain
the insight that Descartes expressed so rationalistically, but, with the repetition of the Jesus
Prayer, the ascetic’s consciousness will be in a condition prior to the exercise of the
ratiocinative faculty of the mind (nous). This notion of the immediate experience of one’s
own thought processes is also similar to St Augustine’s notion of the immediate, personal
experience of one’s own consciousness or thoughts.[15]

To return to the subject at hand, we are here discussing pure consciousness of oneself and of
one’s environment: the fact of awareness.

We are not discussing reason, taken to be the ratiocinative power of the mind (nous).

Let us review these three attributes, the contemplative, the discriminative and the ‘oversee–
ive’. St Macrina says that these three attributes are proper and according to nature in the
soul, and that they are what preserve the image of God in man.

It is well to recall, in view of what St Macrina is about to say about God, that, for her, the
essence of the soul is incomprehensible: we cannot penetrate to the depth of human
existence, the human soul, the mind (nous).

Some further remarks are in order. First, against criticisms that St Macrina is an
intellectualist, the very fact that for her no one can comprehend the essence of the soul of a
human person means that the intellectualist charge is false: while the soul in itself is called
nous, mind, that mind has such a broad content that St Macrina is far beyond any charge of
intellectualism: the intellectual aspect of man is dianoia, which, as we have already
remarked, is an operation (energeia) of the nous. Dianoia does not exhaust the content or
substance of nous; it is an operation of the nous, not its essence.

Next, it is well to recall that systems-theoretic descriptions of mind (nous) are reducible to
algorithms. Hence, we have in what St Macrina is saying a very radical break with all
attempts to model or mimic the mode of functioning of the human mind (nous) with
artificial intelligence systems or with systems-theoretic descriptions in the molecular biology
of the brain or nervous system. For these three intuitive aspects of mind (nous) which
preserve the image of God in man, the contemplative, the discriminative and the ‘oversee–
ive’, precisely because they are intuitive—that is, mental operations of direct apprehension
and not of ratiocination—are immune from representation with computer programs, or
algorithms. Hence also, the Thomist analysis of human action that we mentioned in Chapter
I is equally faulty, for it attempts an intellectualistic analysis, curiously similar to a project to
reduce mind (nous) to an algorithm, of matters that we are here seeing treated as intrinsic
intuitive operations (energeies) of the human mind (nous).[16]

To return to the three attributes—contemplative, discriminative and ‘oversee–ive’—, St

Macrina has defined three aspects of an intuitive power of the soul or mind: to apprehend
Truth, to discriminate the good from the worse, and, let us say, to be conscious of existent
things.

Above, we identified the ‘oversee–ive’ aspect of the mind (nous) with our primary experience
of consciousness. Descartes himself, so it seems, identified his primary experience of
consciousness with his own flow of thought. We will see, however, that we will be obliged to
distinguish between the two as we proceed through Evagrius and, especially, St Hesychios.
Descartes, proceeding in the way we have just said, came up with the formula, ‘Cogito ergo
sum.’ He cast the primary experience of consciousness into a rationalistic, propositional form
of assertion connected to his identification of his primary experience of consciousness with
his own flow of thought or his own ability to reason. We ourselves separate our primary
experience of consciousness from the flow of our thought—for our thoughts can stop
although we are still conscious—and we avoid a rationalistic, propositional formulation.

Now the Greek Fathers nowhere discuss consciousness as a primary datum of experience per
se. That is, the modern preoccupation with the nature of consciousness is found nowhere, as
far as we are aware, in the Greek Fathers, unless it be here in On the Soul and the
Resurrection. The Greek Fathers address the matter differently: they follow the dictum that
Aristotle gives: ‘Mind sees and mind hears.’ In other words, mind (nous) is conscious and the
agent of perception. But the formula goes deeper, as St Macrina was at pains to point out
above: the mind (nous) interprets the data of sense-perception; it gives a sense (idea,
content, interpretation) to the sense-impression: recall St Macrina’s examples from
astronomy, where the primary sense impression of the solar disk had to be given sense
(meaning, interpretation) by the mind (nous).
We see therefore that the Greek Fathers start with the mind (nous) and the sense
impression. For them, the primary fact of conscious experience is sense impression as sensed
by an agent, the soul identified with the mind (nous). By ‘agent’ we want to convey the idea
of the person who sees and who hears. Hence, mind (nous) is the person who sees or hears.
Is this not precisely what St Macrina has said, that one attribute of the power of the soul,
which soul is unknowable in its essence but identifiable with the mind (nous), is that it is
‘oversee–ive’ of existent things? Hence, St Macrina is addressing precisely the mind (nous)
part of the formula ‘Mind (nous) sees and mind (nous) hears.’ For us, consciousness is a
matter of the person who sees and who hears, and we say person to take into account the fact
that the mind (nous) is not an intermediate but the actual party at the end of the telephone
line of sensory experience. This is different from modern analyses of consciousness that start
from the raw datum of undifferentiated sense-perception.

One consequence of the approach of the Greek Fathers is that it enables them to pass from
the primary fact of conscious sense-perception to the conscious experience of intelligible,
non-sensible things—to pass from ‘Mind sees and mind hears,’ to ‘Mind sees intelligible,
non-sensible things and mind hears intelligible, non-sensible things.’ This turning
inwards[17] to intelligible realities is found in Plato’s ascetical program, delineated, for
example, in the Phaedo; it is also found in the Enneads of Plotinus. This turning inwards is
adopted wholeheartedly by both Evagrius Pontikos and St Hesychios; in the form it is used
by St Hesychios it forms the basis of the asceticism of the Philokalia.

Since the mind (nous) is understood to have an existence which is autonomous of sense-
perception, the Greek Fathers can pass from sense-perception to the apprehension of non-
sensible intelligible realities; this is the beginning of Evagrian contemplation. The modern
approach to consciousness, based as it is on the primary datum of undifferentiated sense-
perception, because it does not conceive of a mind autonomous of sense-perception has no
way to proceed ‘inwards’ towards intelligible realities. Of course, in his own philosophy of
man, Hume deliberately foreclosed this road, dismissing both mind and intelligibles as non-
existent. And St Thomas Aquinas, by imposing the view that mind is only ratiocination,
except for certain very limited intuitive capacities,[18] also foreclosed this road to a much
greater extent than does Orthodoxy.
Now according to St Macrina, the person is unknowable in his or her essence. But we have
three attributes: contemplative (theoretikos), discriminative (diakritikos) and ‘oversee–ive’
of existent things (epoptikos ton onton). These three attributes are of a power of this person
who is unknowable in his or her essence. Moreover, importantly, St Macrina adds that these
three attributes are proper to and according to nature in this person. ‘Proper to’ means that
these attributes belong to the nature of this person; they are not accidental. ‘According to
nature’ means both ‘part of the essence’ and ‘excellent’ in Aristotle’s sense: these attributes
are the excellences of the person. When a person is according to nature, rightly himself or
herself, then he or she has these three attributes: he or she is contemplative, discriminative
and ‘oversee–ive’ of existent things.

We can now answer the standard objection to intuitionist theories of ethics, that different
people and different cultures have different moral judgements of what is right and wrong.
This objection is disposed of the in the following way: If Adam and Eve had not fallen in
Paradise, then all men would certainly have the same moral judgements, account being taken
of differences in perspective. Moreover, both Adam and Eve knew that what they did in
eating the fruit was wrong even before their eyes were opened. After the Fall, the image of
God has been disturbed in man, and it is only through Baptism and then an ascetical effort
that the Christian is able to restore first the image and then the likeness of God in himself.
When the Christian has restored the image and likeness of God in himself, then the three
attributes that we are discussing operate according to nature. The man or woman can
contemplate, discriminate between good and the worse and be properly ‘oversee–ive’ of
existent things. Until the image and likeness are restored, however, these attributes function
more or less defectively, without for all that having been lost entirely in any man. Hence,
being subject to the consequences of Adam and Eve’s fall in Paradise, men have an intuitive
ability to discriminate between right and wrong but that intuitive ability is disturbed to the
extent that the image and likeness of God are disturbed in the man because of the Fall.
Moreover, personal sin disturbs even further the image and likeness of God in a man.

We began by remarking that theoretikos was translated ‘speculative’ by others but should
properly be translated ‘contemplative’. Let us add St Macrina’s final remark to see the
significance of this:
 …[A]nd that by means of these things it [the soul] saves in itself the image of the
deiform Grace (since reason also conjectures that the Divine, whatever it is
according to its Nature, is in these things: to oversee all things and to
discriminate the good from the worse).

Hence, the significance of the difference between ‘speculative’ and ‘contemplative’ is

precisely what it means to be in the image of God. It is the difference between a model of
man that makes him essentially ratiocinative and a model of man that makes him essentially
capable of intuitive apprehension of the Divine.

Let us note the repetition of the phrase ‘whatever it might be according to its Nature’. Just as
the soul or mind is incomprehensible according to its nature, so God is incomprehensible
according to his Nature.

Next, let us turn to the assertion ‘…[A]nd … by means of these things, it [the soul] saves in
itself the image of the deiform Grace…’. It is by means of these three attributes, the
contemplative, the discriminative of right and wrong and the ‘oversee–ive’, that the soul
preserves in itself the image of God, since, whatever the Divine really is by nature, reason
supposes that it is in these two things: to watch over all things and to discriminate between
the good and the worse.

The soul has three attributes; the Divine, two. Why? God does not contemplate; he is. Whom
would he contemplate? We might posit an eternal Self-contemplation, but St Macrina is far
from such Scholastic nicety—although she certainly would accept that God knows himself
perfectly, being God. Moreover the matter is further complicated: theoretikos and epoptikos
are virtually identical in meaning. Hence, ‘contemplative’ and ‘oversee–ive of existent things’
could well be rendered ‘contemplative’ and ‘contemplative of existent things’.

Now, ‘contemplative of existent things’ will be very convenient, because Evagrius will discuss
the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of existent things as a stage in the mystical ascent.
And it very well may be that St Macrina ultimately has that in mind. Looked at in another
way, we may here very well have the origin of the Evagrian doctrine of natural
contemplation, especially second natural contemplation: Evagrius may very well have taken
with him from his Cappadocian masters the doctrine that we here see St Macrina expressing
and elaborated it in his own way in the desert of Egypt, with additional borrowings from
Clement of Alexandria.

It is equally evident, however, that this ‘contemplative of existent things’ cannot at this stage
be ripped away from its common-sense meaning of ‘conscious of oneself and one’s
environment’.

God watches over all things. He sees all things as God. He sees the truth of each thing that
exists, what it really is. And as God he knows what each thing was intended to be, what it
really is when it has achieved its excellence. When man, then, is according to the image of
God, then he too sees things as they really are.

Now St Macrina does not have a modern doctrine of consciousness. The soul is identified
with mind (nous), and ‘Mind (nous) sees and mind (nous) hears.’ Moreover, we have refined
this: God sees and so does the mind (nous). God is incomprehensible in his nature, and so is
the mind (nous). The mind (nous) contemplates. (We leave discrimination of the good from
the worse aside here.) The doctrine that ‘Mind (nous) sees and mind (nous) hears,’ from the
grammatical structure alone makes an agent of the mind (nous). Hence, this thing,
incomprehensible in its essence, has a power, attributes of which are that it is contemplative
and contemplative of existent things.

But it is the person who contemplates. How can we pass from agent to person? Could the
person be other than the agent who sees and hears? What is a person? Is he or she not that
which is incomprehensible in his or her essence? Could we have two such things in one man
or woman? A person different from that person’s soul? A soul that sees, contemplates,
contemplates existent things and discriminates between good and evil? Surely a person
contemplates (this point is more profound than it might appear; we will elaborate on this);
surely a person contemplates existent things; surely a person discriminates between the good
and the worse. Person is a moral idea. Hence, we have found the person: it is the moral actor
or agent who sees, hears, contemplates, contemplates existent things and discriminates
between the good and the worse.
The ascription by St Macrina of the three attributes (to which we have attached the
Aristotelian formula she has already adopted) to the mind (nous), taken to be the real soul of
a man, is profound. We here have a portrait of the human person.

In Paradise, Adam and Eve had these attributes in their fullness, although, according to St
John of Damascus, they were in a state of spiritual infancy.[19] When Adam and Eve sinned,
they lost the fullness of these attributes (the ‘in the likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’) without,
however, losing the basic qualities of these three attributes (without losing all the ‘in the
image (kat’ eikona)’). When we are baptized, our sins are forgiven and we receive grace so
that the kat’ eikona (the basic image of God) is restored to its fullness and so that we can
struggle to restore the kath’ homoiosin (the likeness to God); this is the ascetical struggle of
every Orthodox Christian in the state of life in which he or she has been called. In the full
restoration of the likeness, the kath’ homoiosin, these attributes are restored in their
fullness; this is the case of great saints.[20] Earlier we remarked that the Orthodox doctrine
of the nature of the soul puts asceticism into a soteriological context. This is what we had in
mind. For from Orthodox Baptism all men are called to the ascent described, to the ascetical
endeavour—in proportion to their strength; this is the significance of the differing vocation
of each man—, to the restoration of the fullness of the likeness, the fullness of the kath’
homoiosin. For all men have the image of God, the kat’ eikona, by nature; this they have
never lost, and it is this, with the assistance of the grace of Jesus Christ, that enables them to
ascend mystically, once the kat’ eikona has been restored in Orthodox Baptism, to the
restoration of the kath’ homoiosin.

St Macrina has posited that in its nature the soul is the image of God, and that that image is
covered with the warts of the passions (pathe). This suggests that the ascetical endeavour is a
matter of uncovering the soul from the warts. However, the Orthodox understanding of the
matter is that in the Fall of Adam, the soul was sufficiently disturbed that it is not merely a
matter of uncovering the nature of the soul from the warts of the passions; grace is necessary
for the restoration of the soul to the image and likeness of God; this grace begins in Baptism,
in the regeneration of the person in the water, in the restoration of the kat’ eikona, and is
continued in the Mysterial or sacramental life of the Church and in the personal life of prayer
and ascesis of the person, all in a context of the active acquisition of the virtues delineated in
the Gospel: this is the Orthodox Christian’s work to restore the kath’ homoiosin. This is a
doctrine both of the virtues and of grace. For the restoration of the likeness, the kath’
homoiosin, involves the acquisition of virtue, and virtue is acquired only by grace—with the
effort of man surely, but it is the grace of Jesus Christ that instils the virtues so as to
complete the likeness, the kath’ homoiosin.[21]

As we have already remarked, the virtues are the attributes of God that are transmitted from
God to his image, man, by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Hence, they include the three
attributes which are being discussed and which are finally attributes of mystical knowledge.
So we see that virtue, far from being a blind following of rules learned badly in childhood, is
the restoration of the image and likeness of God in man to their fullness, including mystical
knowledge of God and of existent things, both objects and angels, and the ability to
discriminate between the good and the worse. However, since one of the three attributes
being described is the ability to discriminate the good from the worse, the restoration of the
likeness to God involves the restoration of a person who is a moral actor or agent. The
Christian mystic is a moral man. He is a person who is a moral agent that contemplates God.

We mentioned that ‘The person contemplates,’ is important. Recall that we have also
introduced the modern concept of consciousness. The point is that we are making an
identification between soul and person, the moral actor or agent, and we are establishing
that—as befits a servant of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—it is a moral agent who
contemplates God, existent things and chooses to do good: the ability to discriminate
between good and the worse implies an ability to choose to do one or the other. Hence, we do
not view contemplation as a simple alteration of consciousness, although an alteration might
occur—we do not exclude such a possibility. That is not the point, however. An alteration of
consciousness per se has no connection to the God of Jacob who appeared to Jacob in
Penuel.[22]

We will see in St Hesychios that prayer is a moral action: the purification of the mind (nous)
is a moral activity. This is characteristic of Christian mysticism: its moral orientation.

The person who contemplates will be extremely important. And this is important to the West
today, now that mantras are the rage, the fashion is to meditate and to alter your
consciousness in meditation. We are here far from such an understanding. St Macrina,
speaking with her brother St Gregory, elaborates a doctrine different from the modern idea
of consciousness.
St Macrina, in speaking with her brother, St Gregory, a Cappadocian Father, one of the
theologians who was responsible for the concept of person (hypostasis),[23] nowhere
speaks of a human hypostasis, a human person. She does speak of the image of God but not
as the image of one of the three Hypostases—whether the Word, or the Word Incarnate,
Jesus Christ our Saviour. We point this out because we have introduced the idea of ‘person’,
a moral concept, in order to be able to tie Orthodox theology to bioethics, where the central
question is ‘What is a person?’ together with the two related questions ‘When does a person
begin?’ and ‘When does a person end?’ Despite this, our concept of person is of far wider
application in Orthodox theology, especially in regard to the topic of this work, the
psychological basis of mental prayer in the heart, because it is a person who prays the Jesus
Prayer. For person is the whole living person who prays, loves, laughs, is sorrowed, aspires to
God, keeps the commandments: the depths of this person, who is an image of God, are
known only to God. A person is one who can love, one who can love another person.

[8] In the sense of scientific models.

[9] In the philosophical acceptation of direct, without the intermediation of theory-building.

[12] Liddell–Scott.

[13] Which agrees with the other possible meaning given in Liddell–Scott, with the sense given in Lampe and with
the Latin translation in Migne.

[14] Philosophical acceptation.

[16] See Medieval p. 653, Figure 1 and the accompanying discussion by A. Donagan for a summary of St Thomas’
theory of action. We will discuss St Thomas’ theory of human action in detail in Chapter IV.

[17] To use Plotinus’ formulation.

[23] With his brother, St Basil the Great.

Chapter II -- 5

Let us return to the sentence we are analysing. St Macrina posits three attributes of a power
of the soul through which the soul saves in itself the image of the deiform Grace: the
contemplative, the contemplative of existent things and the discriminative of the good from
the worse.

The words epoptikos (concerning man) and ephoran (concerning God), which are used to
convey the notion of ‘oversee–ive’, both have secondary nuances of guidance, providence or
governance. Now, while it may be that St Macrina wishes to hint at these things by using
words that have a nuance of guidance, nowhere does she explicitly address these ideas.
Hence, we will remain with the idea of seeing or watching in the case of each word. But let
the reader be aware of this secondary nuance.

We now want to attack this problem: the relation between these three attributes and the
Christian spiritual program, on the one hand, and modern theories of spirituality which give
a central role to, or place a great weight on, consciousness as something to be manipulated
for the attainment to ‘consciousness of God’, where God is taken to be an aspect of subjective
experience.

Our interest in modern ideas of consciousness expansion is twofold: On the one hand, there
is a tendency in the West, today more than ever, to see consciousness expansion as a central
issue in theology: this is a subjective approach to religious experience.

We assign this theory to Aldous Huxley, who studied Buddhism and Hinduism and took, and
promoted to a certain extent, the use of consciousness-expanding drugs. We have no idea to
what extent Aldous Huxley’s understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism is correct: we are
not Buddhist; we do not know Hinduism; and we would not dare to express an opinion as to
what they teach. Our attempt here is to address the idea of consciousness.
Now the first point we made: Christian mysticism has a strongly moral flavour. One of the
three attributes is moral judgement, and we will see that the concepts of temptation, refusal
of temptation and adherence to God, taken as Other, are inherent in the Hesychast method.
This should alert us that any antinomian tendency is suspect. Moreover, the very practice of
the refusal of temptation is the means used in the ascetical authors to ‘turn inwards’ so as to
pass from the consciousness of sense-perceptions to the consciousness of intelligible
realities, the beginning of contemplation.

It would take us very far afield to develop the whole Hesychast system here; that is what this
work is about and here we can only alert the reader that the moral aspect is intrinsic to
Hesychast spirituality.

Moreover, we have also mentioned the second definitive aspect of Christian spirituality: God
is Other. Hence, contemplation of God is not merely a state of consciousness wherein the
mind (nous) is exalted above the realm of ordinary experience. It is an encounter with an
Other.

Our Lord says in John’s Gospel concerning the Holy Spirit: ‘The wind (pneuma) blows
wherever it will; and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes and
whither it goes. So it is, everyone who is born of the Spirit (pneuma).’[1] This is not an
alteration of consciousness. This is an encounter with the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.
Normally, this encounter is described as an encounter with the Uncreated Light of Christ’s
Transfiguration.

As St Gregory of Nyssa himself says in his commentary on the Songs of Songs: ‘The mere
milk of divine grace is greater than the strongest wine of merely human contemplation.’
There is a power that can contemplate in the human soul, but the least touch of divine grace
is far beyond any contemplation man is capable of by his own efforts—especially fallen man,
expelled from Paradise because he did not reject temptation.

Elsewhere, Christ says: ‘This, then, is eternal life, that they know thee, the only true God, and
him whom thou sent, Jesus Christ.’[2] Now sometimes this passage is interpreted in a non-
dualist way as referring to a light that is immanent in the subject, the person praying, this
light being attainable by manipulation of consciousness through yoga or drugs.

Whatever the merits of such an interpretation, it is not a Christian approach to Revelation.

The Christian remains in this approach: seeking after the Face of the God who appeared to
Jacob in Penuel. Hence, a very basic difference in structure presents itself: the Christian
prays to a God who is Other, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whereas the model of
consciousness we are discussing posits that there are innate structures in the human soul,
taken as a mind-body holistic phenomenon, and that the spiritual life is a matter of gaining
access to a spiritual experience by gaining access to these innate structures. The innate
structures are taken as automatically providing the desired experience, and the spiritual
quest is viewed as the manipulation of the psyche to attain to the desired subjective
experience of the always present but hidden deeper aspect of the person being manipulated.

This is usually presented as a program of yoga, but we do not wish to expatiate: we are
Christian, and we do not know enough about Buddhist or Hindu yoga. Hence, while it is true
that both Buddhist and Hindu yogic writings refer to the grace of the guru as a means of
raising the consciousness to the desired condition in the context of innate structures, there is
nothing that we are aware of that corresponds to the doctrine that the Holy Spirit blows
where it will (this conveys the sovereign freedom of the Holy Spirit from the constraint of
him who is praying) and to the statement that you do not know whence the Holy Spirit
comes and whither it goes. Orthodox spiritual writers uniformly assert this aspect of the
Uncreated Light: just as Christ came and stood in the midst of his disciples, the doors being
bolted,[3] the Holy Spirit is suddenly present without your knowing; and he leaves to go
where you know not. In the Songs of Songs, this is an important motif: the touches of the
Holy Spirit that ravish the soul of him who prays and leave her (i.e. the soul) desolate,
seeking where the Beloved might be.[4]

This is important, for we will discuss a method of prayer that resembles a mantra; and we
will discuss to what extent contemplation is within the voluntary power of him who prays.
The point is this: the touch of the Bridegroom, his caress upon the soul, is completely within
the sovereign power and discretion of the Bridegroom; it cannot be commanded by the one
who prays; it is not the manipulation of innate structures of the human soul—taken as a
holistic mind-body phenomenon—that creates or gives access to these caresses of the
Bridegroom. Hence, man has an innate ability to contemplate; that is what St Macrina has
just said. But his ability to contemplate is restricted by the sovereign freedom of the Other.

As we have said, the very positing of moral judgement in man—and by implication the very
positing of an ability to choose in man—makes the Christian spiritual endeavour essentially
moral: it is a moral activity, sometimes seen as repentance, sometimes seen as the refusal of
temptation.

Let us look at a few aspects of the Genesis account of Adam’s way of life in Paradise. In doing
so we are here passing from a discussion of the contemplation of God, what Evagrius will call
Theology, to the contemplation of existent things, what Evagrius will call natural
contemplation.

God caused the animals to pass by Adam. This is certainly a reference to Adam’s sovereignty
over creation; however, what interests us is that Adam gave names to the animals. Apart
from any question of the nature of language that Scripture might be addressing, we here
have one aspect of Adam’s ability to contemplate existent things: he gives names to the
animals: by implication the names were appropriate—proper—because Adam saw the
animals as they were. The account positions Adam in Paradise, a garden, among trees with
certain characteristics that made them identifiable to Adam: he saw things as they were. We
shall see that one stage of the mystical ascent is natural contemplation, wherein the mystic
begins to see things as they are.

There is no surrender to the ‘oceanic’ here—although Orthodox mystical writers do refer to

periods, relatively brief, of rapture—no undifferentiated raw datum of the consciousness of
sense-perception here. Moreover, God converses familiarly with Adam, and Adam with God:
two separate beings—God and man—hold familiar converse. There is no sense here of the
Tathata (Suchness) of undifferentiated sensory input such as Aldous Huxley refers to in
Island—we must admit that we do not know if a Buddhist adept would recognize Tathata
(Suchness) in what Huxley is describing. The Genesis account does not present
contemplation as ecstasy, loss of consciousness of self. Adam was naked and unashamed, but
he knew he was Adam and he knew God and conversed with him; and he knew the natures of
the animals that passed before him and the nature of the trees that were in the Garden.

Moreover, Adam and Eve were also able to discriminate between the good and the worse.
Here, we pass to the question of the moral struggle for virtue and against sin or vice. In
Evagrius, this will be called the practical life (praktike). It is the stage preliminary to the
contemplation of existent things and to the contemplation of God, and Evagrius treats it as a
necessary prelude to the contemplation of existent things and to the contemplation of God.

While innate to Adam is the power an attribute of which is the ability to discriminate good
and bad, the actual goodness or badness of eating the forbidden fruit does not depend on the
inner essence of the fruit itself, nor does it depend on an intuitive or innate structure of
Adam. The prohibition of the fruit is not a reflexive movement of one part of Adam—his
superego—towards another part of the same Adam—his conscious self or even his
subconscious self—: it is a command of the Beloved Other to his creature, and prior to the
eating of the fruit, the discrimination of the good from the worse hinges on a discrimination
that obedience to the Beloved is good and disobedience to him, bad. It is here that the
reasons adduced by Eve for eating the fruit—‘And the woman saw that the tree was good for
food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to behold and that it was timely for
understanding.’[5]—take on their significance. Because of her innate ability to discriminate
the good from the worse, Eve knew that it was wrong to take the fruit and to eat it. This is her
sin. Moreover, we here have a model of sobriety. The ascetic is engaged in a moral activity—
otherwise how could it be called, and be, repentance? He is faced with keeping the
Commandments—especially the first and great commandment of the Law, to love the Lord.
He is engaged in a battle—with temptation. For ideas come to him presenting ostensibly
good and logical reasons for not keeping the first and great commandment of the Law.

These are what are called thoughts (logismoi) and Evagrius and, following him, St Hesychios
and the whole tradition of the Philokalia spend much time analysing minutely this battle
with the thoughts. Hence, Eve’s temptation—strangely enough—is the model of the Christian
contemplative life, at least at the stage of the practical life (praktike).
This again clarifies the question of the relation between Christian—Philokalic—
contemplation and Eastern concepts of meditation taken as means to alter consciousness.
Eve is not presented as sinning by means of a fall from a pure contemplation taken as the
Tathata (Suchness) of undifferentiated conscious experience without sense of the other, or
such as Evagrius will posit in his heterodox cosmology, nor is there any question here of
exercises in meditation, of falling into Samsara (Illusion), the Hindu concept of the plurality
and multiplicity of consciousness, or of the loss of a higher state of consciousness. There is
the Other; a commandment; a listening to a thought (logismos) from without which tempts
Eve to disobey the commandment; the converse with the temptation; the apparently
reasonable reasons adduced by the thought and by Eve to disobey; the consent to the
temptation (i.e. the decision to disobey); the act of disobedience; the consequences of the sin.
[6]

While there is no question of falling from a higher state of consciousness, it should be

understood that Adam and Eve held familiar converse with God, although without losing
their personal identities. Hence, their exalted state of consciousness—to hold familiar
converse with God implies that you are like unto God—does not destroy their identities as
persons.

We will see in Chapter V that St John of Damascus does include concepts of contemplation
and of a turning away from that contemplation to material things in his presentation of
Adam and Eve in Paradise. However, although his description of Adam and Eve’s condition
in Paradise deals with questions such as these, it must be seen within a Christian context.

We shall see as we go that the fundamental model of Christian meditation is precisely the
schema that we have just given: there is the Other; a commandment—the first and great
commandment of the Law, to love God with all your heart, all your might, and all your
strength—; there are thoughts (logismoi) which tempt us but which, unlike Eve, we must
refuse. This is all of Evagrius’ ascetical psychology, and most of the Philokalia. The Jesus
Prayer is in fact somewhat secondary to this schema, and more secondary at this level of
analysis than is usually recognized. In St Hesychios, the Jesus Prayer is inserted into this
schema, and the Jesus Prayer is prayed in the heart as part of this schema, for it is in the
heart that the battle against temptation is most effectively fought.
Moreover, when we insert the Jesus Prayer prayed in the heart into this schema of the
rebuttal of temptation, it is not a matter of the manipulation of consciousness so as to attain
to the Tathata (Suchness) of undifferentiated sensory input. For the goal is to ‘turn inwards’
from sense-perceptions to intelligible realities. The schema we have just outlined[7] is
fundamental to the use of the Jesus Prayer; it imposes a structure on meditation or
contemplation in the Christian tradition of the Philokalia. We do not know how Hindus and
Buddhists use mantras, or the Sufi, zikr. What we can say with confidence is that a
divergence from this schema of the rebuttal of temptation is fraught with peril for him who
would presume that he is Orthodox in his method of prayer, even if he is praying the Jesus
Prayer twenty-four hours a day—or even: especially if he is praying the Jesus Prayer twenty-
four hours a day. By this, we mean that this schema of the rebuttal of temptation is at the
heart of the method of the Philokalia, and that it is this schema which is implicit in On the
Two Methods of Prayer by St Gregory of Sinai (1255–1346): one who would diverge from
this schema while thinking he were Orthodox would be on a very perilous road indeed. If he
diverges as a Buddhist, as a Hindu, as a Sufi, that is his affair. We do not know anything
about those ways.

Hence, we have clarified the difference between the concept of using the Jesus Prayer in an
Orthodox way and the concept of the manipulation of innate structures (‘using a mantra’) to
produce an experience of altered consciousness which might be considered to be the Tathata
(Suchness) of undifferentiated sensory experience, such as Aldous Huxley presents to be the
basis of all religions.

This is not to say that there are no innate structures. The tradition of the Philokalia after St
John of Sinai (523–603) is clear on the practice of bringing the mind into the heart—even if
the writers leave the actual method ambiguous. For prayer of the mind in the heart to have
any sense beyond the mere subjective experience of an isolated individual without
significance for another person, there must be reference to a common experience of
mankind, that is, to innate structures of the human soul, taken on the one hand in its
connection with God, who is the same yesterday, today and forever,[8] who has given his
Holy Spirit and who has revealed himself; and taken on the other hand in its connection with
the body. Hence, for us, the problem is not whether there are innate structures but the
broader issue of what we do with those innate structures—after all, a man has five fingers on
his right hand and five on his left; the problem is what a man is going to do with his hands,
not how many fingers each nation has: there are innate structures although each nation sees
them differently.

And here is the problem for Western adepts of other faiths, to see that what St Hesychios is
addressing in his discussion of sobriety and mental prayer in the heart flows out of Orthodox
Baptism[9] and Orthodox Faith. To continue our metaphor, yes, we too, the Orthodox, have
five fingers on each of our hands. But we worship God and what we build has a distinctly
Orthodox character. Here, the rebuttal is normally: ‘It’s all the same; these are cultural
differences in the architectural style of the temple you build.’ We say: ‘No. We receive the
Holy Spirit in Baptism; it enlivens, quickens, enlightens, cleanses our mind (nous) and heart,
so that we find our mind (nous) and heart different, and when we descend with our mind
(nous) into our heart, that mind (nous) has been enlivened, quickened, enlightened and
cleansed by Baptism, so that we see things differently. Moreover, when we are with our mind
(nous) in our heart, the problem for us Orthodox is no longer to activate an innate structure
so as automatically to undergo an experience of light, but, on the one hand, to pray in a
certain way, and, on the other hand, to cultivate sobriety—this is the topic of St Hesychios’
work—which sobriety is bound up with the rebuttal of temptation that we have just outlined.
So we, as Orthodox, with our mind (nous) in our heart have an Orthodox activity; we build
an Orthodox building with our hands of five fingers.’

Hence the importance of the materials we are here presenting: they indicate to us the
Orthodox way to pray. Moreover, we will find, as we have indicated above in passing, that the
three attributes that St Macrina posits that preserve the image of God in man both form the
basis of the mystical ascent[10] and are attributes of the mind (nous) that in the mystical
ascent are brought from their operations contrary to nature to their operations according to
nature.

We have digressed somewhat from St Gregory and St Macrina since we have gone on to
discuss some basic issues in Orthodox spirituality, but since St Macrina is about to discuss
the creation of man and its connection to the passions, perhaps we have, in a certain fashion,
set the stage for her discussion.
[6] Readers may recognize here the models of temptation and sin of Evagrius Pontikos, of St Mark the Ascetic (2 nd half
of 4th C.–p.430), of St John of Sinai (523–603) in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, and of St Hesychios in On Sobriety.
These models of sin and temptation will be discussed both in Volume II and in Volume III.

[7] We will encounter it in Volume III as the analysis of temptation of St Hesychios, but it is also present, perhaps less
clearly expressed, in the writings of Evagrius that we shall analyse in Volume II.

[9] This is the subject of a treatise by St Mark the Ascetic.

[10] The discriminative of the good from the worse: the practical life or ‘praktike’; the contemplative of existent things:
natural contemplation; the contemplative: Theology or the contemplation of God

Chapter II -- 6

As many things, however, as lie on a boundary and which have a tendency

towards either of the opposed extremes according to the nature of each, such as
anger or fear or another of these sorts of movements in the soul without which
it is impossible to view human nature, of which things the use in a certain
fashion either towards the good or towards the opposite brings about the
outcome—we reckon that these things came from without to be incident to the
soul, for the reason that no character at all of this sort is to be contemplated in
the Archetypal Beauty.

St Macrina makes two important points. The first is that those tendencies without which one
cannot view human nature, those, that is, which are connected with the passions, lie on a
boundary between extremes—this is the Aristotelian or even Platonic analysis of virtue as a
mean between two extremes—and it is the use of these things which guides the outcome. For
the ascetic this is important: he is always faced with moral choice. It is not enough to say: I
am a spiritual man; whatever I do is correct.[1] There is a danger here that enamoured of the
beauty of natural contemplation we begin to ignore the moral law of God, not only in the
obvious way, but also to indulge our anger, our carelessness, our insouciance, our tendency
to be dishonest, to lie, to cheat, to steal—even if in the obvious moral quality of a monk,
chastity, we are blameless. This is the first thing.
The second is that these things are considered to be incidental to the soul, to come from
without (in the sense of not being of the true nature of the soul) since they are not to be
contemplated in the archetypal beauty of Adam and Eve before the Fall, or, more exactly, in
the archetypal beauty of God himself, the Archetype. We have already seen this second point
and have already discussed the ambiguity of St Macrina’s presentation. Here, she again
seems to be saying that those very impulses which can be used either for virtue or for vice are
foreign to the nature of man, not just the tendencies which are contrary to nature.

This second point is of fundamental significance to the Protestant who is considering

Orthodoxy, either as a potential convert or as an ecumenist or scholar. There is a radical
divergence here in the understanding of human nature between Orthodoxy and
Protestantism. The full significance of Luther’s rejection of monkery and of his adoption of a
doctrine of imputed justification on the basis of an act of faith, as is found among American
Evangelicals even in our own day, is found here, as is the anthropological significance of the
doctrine of the eternal pre-election of the saved in Calvin’s system. For according to the
Apostle, the Christian is called to ‘work out his salvation in fear and trembling’.[2] What this
means, however, as a soteriological doctrine depends on how one understands the passions
‘without which human nature is not to be contemplated’. And what we are saying is that the
Protestant understanding is different from the Orthodox understanding of these matters.

St Macrina insists that the passions are not part of human nature, that they were not part of
the archetypal beauty of Adam and Eve in Paradise. Moreover, in a step about which we
ourselves have reservations, she goes further and says that the impulses involved, even when
viewed as impulses according to nature, as virtues, were not part of the archetypal beauty of
Adam and Eve in Paradise.

The significance of this can be seen by comparing the Greek Patristic doctrine of relations
between man and woman—here about to be explained theoretically by St Macrina—with
John Milton’s doctrine of relations between Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall, as
Milton portrays them in Paradise Lost. There is a difference in understanding here as to
what is intrinsic to human nature. Unless he grasps this fundamental point, the non-
Orthodox would be well-advised to avoid the Philokalia. He will get lost. For the Philokalia is
not a manual of yoga, but a doctrine of the purification of the soul from precisely those
passions ‘which lie on a boundary and which have a tendency to each of the opposed
extremes’—in this commentary taken by us to be the negative passions, the tendencies
contrary to nature of the parts of the soul, the tendencies to vice.

What is in question is what it means to work out your salvation in fear and trembling. For
the Orthodox, the ideal is the monk, the one who has begun to work out his salvation by
working to restore himself to the archetypal beauty of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the
Fall.

This effort to restore oneself to the archetypal beauty involves continual moral decision-
making. It is not a matter of a little contemplation and doing whatever we please. Moreover,
here there is involved a profound doctrine of the virtues—their nature—and of their
acquisition. Life is a struggle; and the life of the monk the greatest struggle: to restore
himself to the archetypal beauty of Adam. This is not to deny the role of grace. We do
nothing—nothing—unless God loves us and gives us his grace in Jesus Christ. But we
struggle in the hope of divine assistance: ‘Ignoring, then, what is behind and being extended
in what is before, with a goal in mind I pursue the award of the higher call of God in Jesus
Christ.’[3] For us Orthodox, this is the ‘higher call of God in Jesus Christ’: to restore the
image and likeness of God in ourselves. The Jesus Prayer is prayed within this framework by
the understanding monk and Orthodox layman (we are not suggesting that the Jesus Prayer
is only for celibate monks). Let us now continue with St Macrina’s further development:

Let the discussion concerning these things be for us, in the meantime, as in the
gymnasium, so that it might escape the abuse of those who listen calumniously.

We prefer Terrieux’ interpretation of this line, that ‘as in the gymnasium’ means ‘with great
precision’,[4] not Moore’s interpretation, that the phrase means ‘hypothetically’.[5]

The account [in Genesis] narrates that the Divine made a start on the making of
man with a certain road and sequence of order. After the universe was framed,
as the [Sacred] History says, man did not directly come into being on the earth,
but the nature of the irrational living beings [i.e. the animals] preceded him;
and the plants preceded the animals. The account, I think, shows by means of
these things that the enlivening force was mixed up into the bodily nature with
a certain sequence, first entering into the beings without sense organs, after
that advancing to the perceptive, and thus then ascending to the mental
(noeron) and rational (logikon).

The living beings without sense organs are the plants; with sense-perception
but without mind (nous) and reason are the irrational animals; with sense-perception
and mind (nous) and reason is man alone on the face of the earth. St Macrina is
saying that life entered into the material creation in that order.

St Macrina is here adapting Aristotle to the Genesis narrative. For these categories of living
beings—the vegetative, the animal or perceptive, and the rational—are precisely Aristotle’s
categories of soul.[6]

Therefore, of existent things altogether, there is the bodily on the one hand and
the mental (noeron) on the other.

We must stop here. This is extremely important to understand. St Macrina is asserting here
that among all existent or created things, some are bodily and some are mental (noeros) and
that this is an exhaustive and complete listing of created beings.

As we have already pointed out, ‘mental (noeros)’ means ‘possessing mind’ and is often
translated ‘spiritual’. Hence, St Macrina is dividing creation into the bodily and the spiritual.
St Basil the Great in the Hexaemeron construes the first line of Genesis (‘In the beginning
God made the Heavens and the Earth…’) to refer to these two creations: ‘the Heavens and
the Earth’ are the spiritual creation and the bodily creation respectively: the angels, on the
one hand, and the creation of which man is a part on the other. In his Confessions, St
Augustine accepts the double creation but says that Scripture is silent about the spiritual
creation: for him ‘the Heavens and the Earth’ of the first line of Genesis refers to the
material, bodily creation: the stars and the earth.[7]

What is at issue here is the existence of a spiritual creation—the angels and, after their fall,
the demons.[8] Since the Enlightenment, Western philosophy has been materialistic in its
orientation, accepting the existence only of a material, sensible world subject to the laws of
scientific investigation. St Macrina and the Orthodox Church accept the existence of a
spiritual world which is apprehended intelligibly and not with the senses, and which
therefore is not subject to investigation by the means of modern science.

This spiritual world, however, is not to be confused with the Platonic world of Ideas, which is
a world of intelligibles which are not spiritual beings. What is the difference? The word
translated ‘spiritual’—noeros—conveys the idea that these spiritual beings—the angels—have
mind (nous). They can think, judge, decide, and act.

Of the bodily, the one is without soul; the other possesses soul. I say, then, that
‘possesses soul’ means ‘that which participates in life’.

St Macrina is bifurcating reality with successive bifurcations, following Aristotle. The first
bifurcation was into the spiritual and the bodily. St Macrina then leaves the spiritual aside
and turns to the bodily. The second bifurcation is of the bodily into the lifeless (the stones,
the wind, the rain and so on) and those things which participate in life (all living things on
the face of the earth).

Of living things, some live together with sense-perception; the others are
without experience of this.

This is the next bifurcation, of the living things into those which have sense-perception (the
animals) and those which do not (plants and such-like).

Again, of those things which have sense-perception, some are rational; the
others lack reason.

This bifurcation of animals, all of which have sense-perception, into those which have reason
(man) and those which do not (all other animals) is fundamental to the Orthodox conception
of man and the animals. Until recently, it was fundamental to the Western philosophical
conception of man and the animals.[9]
Since, therefore, life which had sense-perception would not have been
constituted without matter, neither would the life which had mind (to noeron)
have otherwise come to be in the body, if not implanted in the perceptive. On
account of this, the making of man is narrated last, as containing in itself all the
idea of the life which is contemplated in the plants and in the irrational
animals.

St Macrina is saying that every branch of this tree constructed by successive bifurcations
contains the preceding stages of its pedigree. Man is a rational perceptive living body and he
must contain all the preceding stages of his pedigree. St Macrina refers explicitly to the
perceptive and to the vegetative. Implicitly, she also refers to the fact that man is not a
bodiless creature having mind (noeros): man is not an angel. Since angels do not have man’s
pedigree—they diverged at the first, the bodiless – bodily, bifurcation—they are exempt from
body, vegetative life and sense-perception. Angels know many things, but not by sense-
perception.

So man has a logical pedigree: bodily, living (i.e. having vegetative life), having sense-
perception, having mind (nous).

The reader will recall that we criticized St Macrina’s earlier argument that ‘mental (noeros)’
was the essential characteristic of man, saying ourselves that her argument was most likely
fallacious from a Platonic or Aristotelian point of view. Here, St Macrina is presenting the
correct Platonic or Aristotelian argument: each bifurcation is a bifurcation of genus, and the
attributes of the genus continue to be attributes of the species. Here, the generic attributes—
bodily (material), living (having vegetative life), having sense-perception—continue to apply
to man as a bodily species characterized uniquely by the possession of mind (nous). Angels
belong to a completely different genus than man, the bodiless intelligences.

From the vegetative life, Man has the capacity of being nourished and
increasing, for one can see this sort of thing in the plants also, the nourishment
being drawn in by means of the roots and being completed by means of the
fruits and the leaves. On the other hand, from the irrational animals man has
the capacity of being regulated according to sense-perception. The intellectual
and the rational [power], however, is unmixed and a peculiar property of man’s
nature contemplated in itself.

But just as the nature [of man] has the capacity to attract those things which are
necessary to material life—which very thing when it occurs in us is called
appetite; we say that this is of the vegetative type of life, since it is to be seen
also in the plants, as for example certain impulses naturally operating in the
plants in being filled with what is fitting and in ripening for the sake of
generation—thus, as many things also as are properties of the irrational nature
were mixed up with the mental power (noero) of the soul. Of those things, she
said, are anger; of those things, fear; of those things, all the other things, as
many as operate in us according to opposites, except the rational and
intellectual power, which very thing alone of our life is exceptional, having in
itself, as has been said, the representation of the Divine Character. But since it
is not possible, according to the reason adduced beforehand, for the rational
power to come to be in bodily life in any other way if it does not come to be by
means of the senses, and if sense-perception subsisted beforehand in the
nature of the irrational animals, necessarily, by means of sense-perception and
in relation to those things which are joined together with it [i.e. the impulses
which lie on a boundary between two opposites], the association of our soul
comes to be. These things are as many things as are called passions (pathe)
when they come to be in us—which things have not, by any means, together
filled up human life towards some evil (for truly the Creator would have
responsibility for the vices if from those facts the [causes] of the trespasses
were necessities which had been laid down together with nature—but by the use
of a certain kind of deliberate choice, the movements of the soul of these sorts
become the tools either of virtue or of vice, just as the iron, being moulded
according to the judgement of the artisan towards whatever the consideration
of him who is executing the work should wish, is also shaped according to this
design, becoming either a sword or some agricultural implement.

For Christian psychology, this passage is extremely important, if somewhat difficult to

understand.
Let us start from the beginning. The basic principle is this: We bifurcate created things first
into bodily and bodiless (spiritual, angelic) creatures. We leave the angels aside and look at
the bodily creatures and again bifurcate, this time into lifeless and having life. But since we
have bifurcated the bodily creatures, this means that both the lifeless and living have
material bodies. We have left the angels aside; we are dealing with the material creation. On
the Platonic and Aristotelian principle that one retains the characteristics of one’s
antecedents in one’s logical pedigree, this means that we are dealing only with material
creatures. Some material creatures have life; some do not. We leave the lifeless aside. We
again bifurcate, this time the living material creatures. We again get two classes: those living
material creatures which have sense-perception and those which do not. Those which have
sense-perception we call animals; those which do not (in this bifurcation of living material
creatures) we call plants. But on the principle that one retains the characteristics of one’s
antecedents in his pedigree, the animals still have vegetative life. We again leave aside the
living material creatures without sense-perception (the plants) and bifurcate the animals
(which have sense-perception). Here we get the animals with mind (man) and the animals
without (all the others). Now we can discuss what St Macrina is trying to say.

‘Man has [the capacity of] being nourished and increasing from the vegetative life.’: In
Aristotelian psychology, being nourished and growing larger are vegetative functions. St
Macrina remarks that we see that plants draw in nourishment through their roots and
complete the processing of that nourishment in their leaves and fruit. Man does these same
things—without leaves and fruit, surely. This is a level of analysis similar to that of the
molecular biology of the cell. On the principle of the logical pedigree that we outlined above,
man has these nutritive functions because of his vegetative nature.

On the other hand, the capacity of being regulated according to sense-perception—that is,
the fact that man has sense-perception—man has from the irrational animals. ‘Irrational’
here means ‘without speech’, and, by implication, ‘without mind (nous)’. In his pedigree,
man passes not only through the plants but also through the animals without speech, those
that have, however, sense-perception. This sounds like evolution. It is Aristotle. Darwin
acknowledged a debt to Aristotle.

However, the intellectual and rational capacity properly belongs to man; he alone among
material creatures has it. This capacity is what makes man, man. Here we must take
‘intellectual’ to mean ‘having mind (nous)’ and ‘rational’, which literally means ‘having
speech’, to be pleonastic.

Now St Macrina proceeds to repeat the pedigree of man. The capacity to attract those things
which are necessary to material life is a feature of the vegetative life. St Macrina implies that
this capacity requires material existence (the pedigree again); she also observes that the
same attraction when found in man is called appetite, but that it is a feature properly of
vegetative life since we see in the plants certain impulses naturally operating towards their
being filled with what is fitting and in the ripening of their fruit for the sake of generation.
This is a level at which modern biology has made great strides in the comprehension of life.

Now St Macrina proceeds to make the point she has been leading up to. Man has a vegetative
nature; he also has an animal nature since his pedigree takes him through the animals, which
have sense-perception. Hence, man also has whatever things are properties of the animals
which have sense-perception—anger, fear, and all those things which work by opposites
according to the ethical schema of virtue as a mean between two extremes, an excess and a
deficiency of a naturally occurring impulse. However, man also has the rational and
intellectual power, which power man alone has and in which resides the representation or
image of the Divine Character, the image of God, which man alone has among the bodily
creatures. (Recall the three attributes of the mind (nous) which preserved the image of God
in man: the contemplative, the discriminative of the good from the worse and the
contemplative of existent things.)

Now St Macrina makes a very important assertion. If, for the reasons already given, it is not
possible for the rational power (mind or nous) to come to be in bodily life unless it comes to
be by means of sense-perception—this is the principle of retaining the previous stages of
one’s logical pedigree—and if sense-perception existed beforehand in the nature of the
irrational animals, then necessarily the constitution of the human soul, which is primarily
mental (noeros), is effected on the basis of both sense-perception and those things which are
joined together with sense-perception in the irrational animals, namely the impulses which
lie on a boundary between two extremes. To be able to be a mind (nous) in a material body,
man has to have the life of sense-perception that he shares with the irrational animals. That
life of sense-perception brings with it to man all those other things which are joined together
with sense-perception in the irrational animals, those things which in man lie on a boundary
between two extremes and which come to be called passions (pathe) when they are seen in
operation in man. Although St Macrina passes it over in silence, it is equally true that to have
the life of sense-perception in a body, man has to have the vegetative life.

Now St Macrina makes an important statement about the nature of the passions (pathe).
They are not intrinsically evil. They ‘have not, by any means, together filled up human life
towards some evil.’ For, otherwise, if, from the reasons given, the causes of our moral
trespasses were necessities that had been laid down together with nature—if moral evil were
due purely and simply to what we took from the irrational animals when we took up sense-
perception—then God himself would have the responsibility for the evil that man does since
he it is who created man with sense-perception and the passions—clearly an unacceptable
alternative. But by the use of a certain kind of deliberate choice, the impulses of the soul that
man took up from the irrational animals along with sense-perception become the tools either
of virtue or of vice. That is, yes, man has these impulses. But it is what he does with them
that makes those impulses either virtuous or vicious. This is fundamental to our approach to
the psychological basis of mental prayer in the heart: the ascetic is engaged in a battle to
make use of these impulses for virtue and to avoid making use of them for vice. However,
this psychology is relevant to all Christians, not only to tonsured monks. Every Christian is
called after Baptism to this struggle. That is why we commented several times that the
anthropology that one adopts has a pervasive influence on his soteriology. Here, we see that
the Orthodox Christian has a certain understanding of the passions, or, better, of the ‘animal
impulses’. He sees them not as determinative in themselves of his behaviour—forces over
which he has no control, forces which determine his conduct in a fatalistic way—but as drives
which, according to his conscious deliberate choice he can turn to good or to evil. Moreover,
as a Christian he is called to exercise his conscious deliberate choice in a manner consistent
with his Christian vocation; the monk who practises mental prayer in the heart is merely a
Christian who has dedicated himself completely and unreservedly to the Christian project of
working out his salvation ‘in fear and trembling’.[10]

However, there is a structural problem in the way that St Macrina has adapted Aristotle here.
Aristotle did not have a Christian cosmology, and his view that the passions are neutral, their
goodness or badness depending on the deliberate choice of the person who has them, is
based on his own more naturalistic cosmology. An indication of the sort of problem that
arises can be seen in the fact that St Thomas Aquinas, as we shall see in Chapter IV, modifies
Aristotle here: some passions, for example envy, are intrinsically vicious, whereas other
passions, for example modesty, are intrinsically virtuous. The problem here is the Christian
notion of the condition of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall, the Fall and Adam and
Eve’s condition after the Fall. While the psychological insight of Aristotle concerning the role
of deliberate choice in moral behaviour is important in Christian moral psychology, his
moral psychology must be modified to be adapted to a Christian cosmology. This St Macrina
does not do here. What must be taken into account is the operation of the parts of the soul
according to nature before the Fall and their tendency to operate contrary to nature after the
Fall. These are not Aristotelian concepts.

To go on, St Macrina then uses the example of the artisan who moulds a piece of iron. By
conscious, deliberate choice, the artisan decides what he wishes to make, and moulds the
iron accordingly, making it either a sword or an agricultural implement. Similarly, each
Christian is always faced with the choice: what am I going to make of myself—of these
impulses which I find in myself—in the present concrete situation in which I now find
myself? Sometimes the struggle can be very intense indeed, the more so for the monk.
However, it is important to understand that this is the foundation for all Christians not only
of the life in Christ but also of the spirituality of the Philokalia. It is also important to
understand that both the monk and the lay Christian await and ask the grace of God to do
the will of God and to make what God wants of the impulses that are to be found in them in
the current concrete situation. This is the foundation of cœnobitical asceticism. An attempt
to pray the Jesus Prayer would be fraught with peril did it diverge from this understanding.

[1] Evagrius will say this about the perfect.

[7] However, Fr Copleston writes that St Augustine treated the ‘Fiat lux,’ of Gen. 1, 3 as referring to the angelic creation
(Copleston Volume II, p. 274).

[8] ‘I saw Satan fallen like lightning from Heaven.’ (Luke 10, 18.)

[9] See the discussion in Chapter I, above, of questions raised today by a Western philosopher whether a man has any
more right to life than a dog.
 Chapter II -- 7

Let us go through this one more time. St Macrina speaks of the various impulses that are
found among the animals. Man must have sense-perception to have mind (nous). This is a
necessary fact for material living beings. But to get sense-perception, man must, as it were,
also take the rest of the animal nature (the various impulses which are joined to sense-
perception in the irrational animal). The association of the soul that St Macrina refers to is
the partnership of mind (nous) with sense-perception and with those things in the irrational
animal that are allied to sense-perception. To get mind (nous), man must take up the animal
nature as a basis for his mental faculties.

As St Macrina pointed out earlier, those things which are joined to sense-perception in the
irrational animal are those things which are analysed by opposites such as fear and anger. As
she remarks, in man these are called passions (pathe).

St Macrina has given a complete account of man’s passions based on Aristotle. But she stops
not at all. She makes an extremely significant point. These things (the passions) do not of
themselves fill human life with evil. For, given that God created man, God would have
responsibility for man’s vices from the fact that the causes of the trespasses would then have
been laid down with nature.

St Macrina is analysing the relation between the passions (pathe) and moral responsibility—
a very important matter since the popularization of Freudian psychology.

St Macrina says that if the passions by themselves filled human life with evil, then, since they
are in man by virtue of his creation, God would have responsibility for man’s vices. This is a
reductio ad absurdum: what is implied is that man would then have no moral responsibility
since he would then trespass by necessity.

Now, there are people today who say this, and reject Christian moral responsibility on the
grounds that the drives that a man succumbs to are implanted in him by his nature and that
he cannot do otherwise. This is usually the argument advanced in the West today against one
or another aspect of traditional Biblical—Christian—morality.
Before we turn to St Macrina’s analysis of why this is not so, let us look at a parallel point:
the relation between what St Macrina is saying and the theory of evolution. St Gregory and St
Macrina died before 400. They were devout Orthodox Christians of the late Classical Age.
Darwin (1809–1882) was born 1400 years after St Gregory and St Macrina died. St Gregory
and St Macrina knew nothing about any theory of Darwin.[1] However, the compatibility of
what St Macrina says—this is not an artefact of our translation but really there—and modern
theories of biology is striking.[2]

Now, in regard to responsibility, moral choice and modern theories of innate drives which
govern man’s behaviour, St Macrina has a very important point. It is the use of the drive by
the man in the deliberate exercise of his free will that determines whether the drive becomes
a tool in man of virtue or of vice.

St Macrina has again begun by asserting that the passions are not part of man’s true nature
and ended by asserting that the passions are not completely bad, that they have good aspects,
here according to the deliberate choice of the Christian.

Strangely enough—as it might appear—this point about the deliberate choice of the Christian
is fundamental to the psychology of the Jesus Prayer as it is prayed orally, mentally or even
in the heart. It corresponds to our observation that a very great part of the practice of prayer
of the heart is the rebuttal of temptation in order to keep the commandments to love God
and one’s neighbour.

St Macrina uses the excellent metaphor of the iron moulded by the artisan: the iron is
moulded towards whatever the consideration or judgement of the artisan who is executing
the work would wish, becoming either a sword or an agricultural implement.

Earlier, in connection with the use of the Prayer of Jesus, we referred to innate structures of
the human soul, taken in reference both to God and to the body, and alluded to the use of
mantras in Hinduism and Buddhism, and even to the use of zikr in Sufism. Here we have an
answer to the claim that all these methods are equivalent: it is the judgement or
consideration of him who executes the work that determines whether the iron will become a
sword or a ploughshare. Similarly, there may be innate structures that support the use of a
mantra in Buddhism or of the Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox Church: that is the iron, these
innate structures. But it is the judgement or consideration of him who executes the work that
determines what will become of the iron: this is the Orthodox Faith, the Hindu belief system,
the Buddhist belief system, the Sufi belief system. These differ. And what is made of the iron
differs according to the judgement of him who executes the work: what is made of the Jesus
Prayer, the mantra of Hinduism, the mantra of Buddhism, the zikr of Sufism, depends on
the judgement—the faith, the belief system—of him who prays the Jesus Prayer, uses the
mantra and so on. Hence, to say that all religions are the same, that they all lead to the same
result, that they all do the same things to the same innate structures, is to say that all iron
implements are the same, that they differ only in shape according to the culture of the
artisan. The intention, belief and judgement of the artisan play their role however, and that
is the difference among the religions of mankind.

Moreover, here we have a very strong doctrine of Christian responsibility. As we have

pointed out, since Freud—at least in the popular mind—there has been a tendency to
diminish the role of conscious, deliberate choice and to emphasize the determinative role of
innate drives (id impulses) in human behaviour. If one adds the genetic substrate, then one
begins to view man as an irrational animal who cannot choose to do well. We cannot here
address the very difficult issue of the relation between Christian psychology and modern
theories of abnormal psychology, which are many and various and not in agreement the one
with the other on fundamental points. We can only surmise that a psychology is deficient
which ignores St Macrina’s fundamental point: it is what the person chooses to do with his
situation that determines the moral content of his chosen behaviour. It is only in the
relatively rare instances that the person is quite disturbed that he or she completely lacks the
capacity for moral choice. We would imagine that certain genetically based illnesses fit this
criterion, but not all mental illnesses, especially when appropriate medication is taken,
prevent moral choice and moral behaviour.

When we discuss Evagrius in Volume II, we will be faced with a discussion of certain kinds of
abnormal behaviour or experiences on the part of certain ascetics—some very serious and
graphically described by Evagrius. We will then discuss the connection between traditional
Christian theories of demonic possession and modern psychological theories. However, until
then, it is well to bear in mind that Christian psychology is moral. Questions of moral
responsibility, of trespass, of sin, of guilt, of responsibility, of the causes of sin have always
entered into Christian morality, here taken as a psychological system. This is not to suggest
that Christian mysticism is a bleak affair of rules on what to do and what to avoid—the Songs
of Songs is taken by St Gregory himself as the height of mysticism; and the Songs of Songs is
a bridal song of union with a Beloved by a bride, who is the soul; and St Hesychios likens the
Hesychast to one who insatiably aspires to God until he reaches the Seraphim, the highest
and most illumined order of angels.

But this marriage of the bride with the Beloved is built on a foundation of Christian morality;
and this moral orientation enters intimately into the mystical ascent.

This is the structure of Christianity, and it is a misreading of Orthodox mysticism to develop

an antinomian freeness in one’s ascent towards the Beloved.

[1] Or even, indeed, about any theory of spiritual evolution such as is associated with the name of Teilhard de Chardin
(1881–1955).

[2] Concerning Teilhard de Chardin’s theories, however, it must be remarked that St Macrina, following Scripture, has
man created according to the image of God; there is no automatic upward aspiration of a spiritualized material creation
towards divine things after the manner of Teilhard de Chardin

Chapter II -- 8

Let us turn again to St Macrina’s argument:

Therefore, if reason (logos), which very thing is remarkable in our nature,

That is, man alone has reason.

have the rule of those things which have been introduced to us from without,
St Macrina has not completely discarded her original analysis that the passions (pathe) are
like warts on the true nature of the soul, the mind (nous). We will discuss these two analyses
below.

as the narrative of Scripture also suggests allegorically, ordering man to rule

over all the irrational animals, not one of the movements of this sort would
operate in us towards the service of evil.

We will return below to the relation of reason (logos) to deliberate moral choice, in view of St
Macrina’s earlier assertion of the existence of an innate power of the mind (nous) to judge
intuitively between the good and the worse.

Fear would work obedience; irascibility, manliness; timidity, safety;

‘Timidity’: Here, in the sense of prudence.

the desiring impulse, then, would provide to us the divine and undefiled
pleasure.

These are fundamental assertions; we will see them right up to the last chapters of St
Hesychios in Volume III. Let us look at them one by one, but let us first remark that here we
see the first concrete examples of the use of the passions (pathe) according to nature, as
virtues.

‘Fear would work obedience’: One obeys one’s parents; the monk obeys his abbot or elder or
spiritual father; all men obey God. ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, a good
understanding, then, is to all those who do it.’[1] It is for this reason we have fear implanted
in us, not so that we run away from the battle.

‘Irascibility would work manliness’: Manliness is out of fashion today in the West. This
makes it difficult for Westerners to become Athonite monks, for great courage and strength
of heart—manly courage, manliness—are needed in the Athonite monk. It is a great and
difficult struggle.

‘Timidity would work safety’: We are not reckless.

‘And the desiring impulse would provide to us the divine and undefiled pleasure.’: This is
fundamental to an understanding of Orthodox monasticism. We will therefore spend some
time in discussing this. The reference to the ‘desiring impulse’ is to Eros (eros), which we
have already encountered. We here see that Eros (eros) is the operation of the desiring part
of the soul according to nature, here an aspiration to God although it is also considered to be
an aspiration to virtue.

What is the ‘divine and undefiled pleasure’? It is the pleasure of the contemplation of and
union with the Divine. It is the experience of the love of God of whom it is said: ‘God is
love.’[2] This love is experienced by the monk both as recipient of the divine love and as giver
in turn of this love to others. Based as it is on an objective experience of the Divine Other, it
cannot be construed to be a sublimation of a sexual drive. The monk has an objective
experience of divine love: the departure of the Beloved, as we have already said, is an
important motif in the Songs of Songs; that is why the bride, the soul, searches through the
streets of Jerusalem, enduring the blows of the watchmen, inconsolable at her loss.[3]

There is much pain and suffering in Orthodox monasticism: the service of tonsure says it; the
Elders say it; the books say it—notably the Ladder of Divine Ascent of St John of Sinai,
which remarks in Step 1 that if God did not conceal from the layman the difficulty of the
monastic state, no one would become a monk.[4] Hence, our love is mixed with the bitter: we
have the divine and undefiled pleasure of the experience of receiving the divine love and of
giving it in turn to our brother and neighbour, and we have the Cross. It is a difficult
vocation. One experiences the pain of a mother giving birth: she suffers for her child; if the
child grows, she suffers yet more, yet she would sooner die than lose her son, her daughter—
her child. Nonetheless, the mother is faced with the incomprehension of the son who
commits sin without understanding what he is doing, of the daughter who is wayward. It is a
difficult thing to be a father or mother, much, much more difficult to be a monk. It is in this
context that the pure pleasure of the contemplation of God must be understood.
If reason (logos), however, put off the reins and, like some charioteer entangled in the
chariot, be dragged behind by it, led off wherever the irrational movement of the team of
foals yoked to it should lead it, then the impulses are turned into passions (pathe), as can,
truly, be seen in the irrational animals. For since thought does not have charge over the
movement which naturally lies in the irrational animals, the irascible sorts of animals, being
commanded by anger, are destroyed by each other; the fleshly and strong animals purchase
with their strength no good of their own, becoming the possession of the rational animal [i.e.
man] on account of their lack of reason; the operation of desire and pleasure occupies itself
concerning nothing of the higher things; neither is anything else of those things which are
contemplated in the irrational animals conducted by some reason towards what is profitable.
Thus also, in us, if these things not be led by means of thought towards what is proper, but,
instead, the passions (pathe) prevail over the dominion of the mind (nous), then the man
passes over from the intellectual and deiform towards the irrational and mindless, being
made into a beast by the impulse of the emotions of this sort.

We mentioned previously that we would look at two things: first, the relation of St Macrina’s
first model of the passions as warts on the true nature of the soul, the mind (nous), to her
second model of the vegetative, animal and rational natures of man; and, second, the
connection between reason (logos) and deliberate moral choice.

Let us take the second matter first. It should be clear that St Macrina uses ‘reason (logos)’
rather than ‘mind (nous)’ in her discourse here because she is following Plato, as her use of
the image of the charioteer to depict reason (logos) shows. It should be equally clear that
reason (logos) is here a Platonic synonym for mind (nous). While reason (logos) or intellect
(dianoia)—ratiocination—is an operation of the mind (nous), what St Macrina and St
Gregory intend here is not an intellectualistic ethic whereby one conducts an exercise in
reasoning in order to control the passions, but that the mind (nous), as St Macrina and St
Gregory have defined it, should be in charge of the person’s actions, and should govern the
impulses of the irascible and desiring parts of the soul, the temper and the desire. This latter
interpretation, that the mind (nous) should be in charge of the impulses of anger and desire,
is a spiritual one, and fits well with the idea of the conscience as an intuitive discrimination
of the good from the worse. The ascetical program is precisely to accomplish definitively
what St Macrina is saying: to put the mind (nous) in charge of the impulses of anger and
desire, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to bring the impulses of anger and desire
into their operation according to nature, which is virtue—all the while in an intuitive or
mystical, and not rationalistic, context.

This is Evagrius’ ascetical program, to which we will turn in Volume II, although we will
discuss it in the next chapter, and it is on Evagrius’ program that the whole Philokalia builds,
including St Hesychios in On Sobriety, to which we shall turn in Volume III.

Let us now turn to the first matter. We are not sure how word-for-word St Macrina would
want us to take the notion that after the Fall the mind (nous) is the image of God pure and
simple. As we have already pointed out, St Macrina’s presentation of the passions as warts on
the true nature of the soul appears to be an influence of Plotinus. St Gregory is quite clear in
On the Making of Man that because of the Fall, the Christian program of the restoration of
the image is a lifelong endeavour; indeed the metaphor he uses there of the never-finished
sculpture has a direct parallel in Plotinus’ Enneads: in Plotinus, it is a matter of uncovering
the true nature of the soul from the mud which has covered it.

In general, Orthodox anthropology posits that the image of God has been disturbed because
of the Fall, and that it is not merely a matter of uncovering the image by removing the warts
of the passions, whether taken merely as the negative passions, or as the irascible and
desiring parts of the soul pure and simple. We will see this clearly in Chapter V. Grace is
needed, first in Baptism and Chrismation, and then later through the Mysteries or
sacraments—especially the Mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ, but including all the
Mysteries or sacraments such as Confession and Unction, and all the mysteries appropriate
to the state of life to which the Christian has been called. Moreover, the Christian’s personal
effort—this is what asceticism is—is also required. Nothing happens if the Christian does
nothing.

Given St Gregory’s views in others of his works, the result is the same whether we take St
Gregory literally on the passions as warts on the true nature of the soul or else consider the
matter from the viewpoint of standard Orthodox anthropology: by means of a lifelong
personal ascetical effort, the Christian works with the help of Christ to restore the likeness of
God in himself. It might be remarked that there is no doctrine in the Orthodox Church that
man has been ‘depraved’ by the Fall of Adam: although the image of God has been disturbed
by the Fall, and subsequently by each man’s personal sin, it is never completely lost: man is
not born depraved and at the mercy of an eternal election or not to salvation: he is always a
person who can make a choice for or against salvation.

We are not sure about another point. This is the matter of St Macrina’s doctrine that the
passions are not intrinsically part of man’s nature. We have mentioned this several times
already. We mentioned, in referring to a passage of Luke, which concerns our Lord’s
response to the Sadducees who asked him about the woman with seven husbands, whose
would she be in the Resurrection,[5] that we would not want either to insist or not to insist
that that passage indicated that the desiring and irascible parts of the soul would be absent
from man in the Resurrection. It is clear from the passage of Scripture that men will be like
the angels in the Resurrection and that they will not marry. But it is not evident if that means
that they will only have their mind (nous) in their resurrected body, or whether they will also
have the desiring and irascible parts of their souls, completely transformed or transfigured
so as to operate according to nature. In other words, do angels have Eros (eros) for God? We
do not know. Will man after the Resurrection have Eros (eros) for God? Will he have the
manly virtues? We do not know. Certainly St Gregory’s presentation of St Macrina indicates
that man will not—unless we ourselves are reading St Gregory too literally, since the
examples adduced by St Macrina tend to a different point of view, that only the passions
taken as vices will be absent. In the passage immediately above, St Gregory has St Macrina
say that the animal impulses in a man become passions when the man allows them to
dominate his behaviour: this is the correct formulation of the relation between the basic
drives that a man has and the passions taken as operations of the irascible and desiring parts
contrary to nature. However, this distinction is not clear in the previous formulations that St
Gregory has as author given.

In any event, before the Resurrection—that is, in regard to the ascetical life—there is no
difference in the two points of view. For we ourselves take the position that the ascetical life
is aimed not at eradicating the desiring part and the irascible part of man—not even St
Gregory presents St Macrina as saying such a thing—but at transforming in ascesis under the
guidance of the mind (nous) and with the grace of God the desiring and the irascible parts so
that they operate according to nature (virtuously) and not contrary to nature (viciously).
Hence, whatever opinion we might have about the state of the human soul in the human
body after the Resurrection, the ascetical program remains the same, and it is precisely the
ascetical program that has here been delineated theoretically by St Macrina: the use of the
desiring and the irascible parts of the soul according to nature by the exercise of conscious,
deliberate choice. This is precisely the Evagrian ascetical system that we will discuss in
Volume II. However, Evagrius uses a definition of the passions which treats them uniformly
as movements of the temper and desire contrary to nature: he treats the movements of the
soul according to nature as virtues.

We will see in Chapter IV that St Thomas Aquinas, who formed subsequent thinking in the
Roman Catholic Church, takes the position that the passions are natural to man (this is a
more strictly Aristotelian position than the one taken by St Macrina) and that they are good
to the extent that they are subject to the governance of reason (taken by St Thomas strictly to
be ratiocination), even though the passions are present only ‘virtually’ when the soul leaves
the body at death. As St Gregory presents St Macrina, St Macrina’s position is that the
passions are not part of the true nature of man; St Macrina’s is a more strictly Platonic
position. However, St Thomas Aquinas and St Macrina in her second model both agree,
following Aristotle, that the passions are morally neutral impulses implanted in man whose
use by the reason (however that reason is interpreted by each author) makes them either
good or bad.

We will, in the next three chapters, turn to several topics: The first topic is the cosmology of
Evagrius Pontikos. We are very interested in Evagrius’ ascetical and contemplative
psychology, to which we shall devote Volume II, and studying his cosmological theories will
introduce us to that ascetical and contemplative psychology.

The next topic is certain aspects of Orthodox anthropology that we have not yet addressed.
We will address those aspects in Chapter III in the context of Evagrius’ own anthropology as
embedded in his cosmology, so that by its contrast with Orthodox anthropology, again drawn
from a work of St Gregory of Nyssa, this time On the Making of Man, we can complete our
discussion of Orthodox anthropology.

In Chapter IV, as a foil to Orthodox anthropology, we will look at Western Christian

conceptions of man, notably those of the Roman Catholic Church in the person of St Thomas
Aquinas. We will also raise the issue of whether St Thomas’ psychology is compatible with
the Orthodox practice of mental prayer.
In the final chapter of this volume, Chapter V, we integrate the preceding material into an
Orthodox image of the vocation of man, touching also on the anthropology of St John of
Damascus.

Chapter III -- 1

III THE COSMOLOGY OF EVAGRIUS PONTIKOS

The cosmology of Evagrius Pontikos was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in 553.
It therefore has no interest to us from the point of view of an Orthodox anthropology.
However, although Evagrius was himself condemned, along with the cosmological theories
he seems to have been responsible for formulating in their final form, his ascetical
psychology, based in part on that of Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215), has always exerted
a very great influence in Christianity, whether in East or in West. A discussion of Evagrius’
cosmology will enable us to understand more clearly his ascetical psychology, with which we
shall be dealing in detail in our second volume, The Evagrian Ascetical System. Moreover, a
discussion of Evagrius’ condemned cosmology, which includes his anthropology, will enable
us to refine and clarify by contrast certain aspects of our own Orthodox anthropology.

The main, and certainly the most elaborate and polished, work of Evagrius as regards his
heretical cosmological theories is the Kephalaia Gnostica, or the Gnostic Chapters. This
work is a set of six centuries of short, obscure paragraphs—chapters—which span Evagrius’
cosmological theories, his anthropology and his theories of asceticism and contemplation.
However, perhaps intentionally, the chapters do not follow one another in serial thematic
order: chains of chapters on different topics are interwoven and the chapters do not follow a
developmental sequence within a topical chain, with the result that it is difficult for the
reader to grasp Evagrius’ train of thought on any one topic without a great effort to
disentangle the topical chains and to establish their internal thematic order. In this effort at
obscurity, Evagrius may have been influenced by the similar effort at obscurity, achieved in
much the same way, of Clement of Alexandria in the Stromateis.[1]

Moreover, the Greek original of the Kephalaia Gnostica appears to have been lost, and all
that remains of the work are two different Syriac translations, one of which, the version
commune (S1), which exists in several manuscripts, appears to be a bowdlerized version of
the Kephalaia Gnostica, and the other of which, the version intégrale (S2), which exists in
one manuscript alone, appears to be an authentic translation of the lost original.[2] We have
translated into English the French translation of the Syriac of the version intégrale (S2)[3]
and are here working from that English translation.[4] The reader should be aware, however,
that we have not consulted the Syriac versions. Hence, the English text that we are dealing
with is the English translation of the French translation of the Syriac translation of a lost
Greek original. With such a long chain of translations, there is bound to be error. This is
especially evident when questions of subtle differences in Evagrius’ terminology arise: it is
never clear whether a slight difference in terminology reflects a nuance in Evagrius’ own
thinking or is merely an artefact of the chain of transmission and translation.

We have provided the full text of our English translation of the Kephalaia Gnostica in
Appendix 2 of Volume II, The Evagrian Ascetical System.

Evagrius refers to the Kephalaia Gnostica in his Letter to Anatolios, which in the manuscript
tradition forms the preface to the Treatise on the Practical Life, itself presented and
discussed in Volume II. The Kephalaia Gnostica is intended as part of a trilogy comprised of
the Treatise on the Practical Life, The Gnostic, and the Kephalaia Gnostica. As Evagrius
himself says in the letter:

Concerning, then, the practical life and the gnostic life, we are now going to narrate, not as much as we
have seen and heard, but as much as we have learned from them [i.e. his gnostic teachers] to say to
others, the practical in one hundred chapters, the gnostic life divided into fifty in addition to six
hundred chapters passing through in an abridged fashion; and we have hidden certain things and
obscured others, so as ‘not to give holy things to dogs and not to cast our pearls before swine’ [cf. Matt.
7, 6]. These things, however, will be clear to those who have followed in the same track as they [i.e. his
gnostic teachers].[5]

In fact, the Kephalaia Gnostica is a classic of the genre of the deliberately obscure mystical
treatise. To begin with, each century has only ninety, and not one hundred, chapters, as the
word ‘century’ would lead us to expect. As can be seen from the quotation, this seems to have
been intentional: Evagrius is announcing that he is hiding certain things.
It is well to remark that Evagrius is not a ‘gnostic’ in the sense of the gnostic movements and
heresies which bedevilled Christianity in the first centuries of its existence and which were
battled against by St John the Evangelist in his first epistle and by St Irenæus of Lyons
(c.130–c.200). ‘Gnostic’ has a different sense with Evagrius, one which he appears to have
taken from the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria: Clement uses the term to contrapose a
Christian gnosis to the gnosis preached by the heretical gnostic movements prevalent in
Alexandria in his day.

Given the deliberately obscure nature of the Kephalaia Gnostica, it is difficult to present a
clear summary of its doctrine. We have benefited from the use of the cut-and-paste facilities
of a common word-processing program to separate the 540 chapters that exist of the
Kephalaia Gnostica into thematic groups, and then to rearrange the chapters within those
groups. The program did not provide us with the themes for the thematic groups, nor did it
provide us with the criteria for inclusion in or exclusion from one group or another, nor did it
provide us with the criteria for the internal rearrangement of the groups; it merely allowed
us, once we had entered the text of our translation into the machine, the possibility of doing,
in a few tedious days, a very tedious cut-and-paste job that otherwise would have required a
year to do. Needless to say, another person doing the same job would have come up with
different thematic groups, different criteria for inclusion or exclusion, and a different
internal rearrangement of each group. Human judgement enters into such an affair
inextricably. However, we had read and translated the Kephalaia Gnostica before
commencing the operation.

Moreover, we did not use the computer to scan the text mechanically for certain key-words
as a criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from a thematic group. Given that the Greek
original appears to have been lost and that we are working from a third-generation
translation, such a procedure, even if it could be justified intellectually, would be of very
doubtful utility: one of the problems in understanding the Kephalaia Gnostica is precisely to
discern where variations in terminology are due to Evagrius and where they are due to
problems in transmission and translation.

We read each chapter and made an evaluation as to what the point of the chapter was. That
was not always easy and the reader may not always be happy with our arrangement.
Moreover, clearly, some chapters fit into two or more thematic groups equally well. This
procedure was facilitated by the brevity of the chapters, which for the most part are highly
focused and contain the expression of a single thought or idea, but there is no getting round
the obscurity of Evagrius: some of the chapters eluded us, especially concerning eschatology.

Finally, for the purposes of this study, we ignored almost entirely the numerous chapters of
the Kephalaia Gnostica which are devoted to allegorical interpretations of terms of Scripture
and to definitions of a similar nature. They were not germane to the matter at hand.[6]

We had also read and greatly profited from Antoine Guillaumont’s study of the Kephalaia
Gnostica, Les ‘Képhalaia Gnostica’ d’Évagre le Pontique.[7] Although our presentation of
Evagrius’ doctrine does not depend on Professor Guillaumont’s conclusions, we agree with
Professor Guillaumont in general, especially as concerns the legitimacy of what he calls the
version intégrale (S2) over the version commune (S1) of the Kephalaia Gnostica. The reader
is cordially directed to Professor Guillaumont’s study for further details. He is also cordially
directed to a very good introduction by Professor Guillaumont to Evagrius Pontikos: ‘Un
philosophe au désert: Évagre le Pontique’.[8]

In presenting this summary of Evagrius’ doctrine in the Kephalaia Gnostica, we are

motivated by our wish to clarify certain concepts so as better to understand what Evagrius
intends to say in his ascetical works, since we will deal with his ascetical doctrines in Volume
II. However, we also wish to present Evagrius’ cosmological doctrines with a view to their use
by contrast to the Orthodox doctrine of the person, so as to clarify further that doctrine,
essentially by reference to On the Making of Man by St Gregory of Nyssa.

It might be wondered, given that Evagrius Pontikos is a condemned heretic, why we should
want to bother with him at all. For what could be the profit in such an exercise? However, as
we have already remarked, although his cosmological doctrines were condemned by the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod in 553, Evagrius’ ascetical doctrines have not only never been condemned
but have exerted an immense influence on Christian asceticism in both East and West. This,
as we shall see, is especially true in the case of the Philokalia. Hence, we are attempting to do
what St John the Prophet, the fellow ascetic and disciple of St Barsanuphios (fl. 1st half of 6th
C.), counsels in his answer to Question 602, to separate the good fish from the bad:
 Question 602

Question of the same person: Must we therefore not read the works of Evagrius?

Answer of John: Do not accept the dogmas of that sort. If you wish, however, read his works that are
for the benefit of the soul, according to the parable of the net in the Gospel, as it has been written: ‘…
[O]n the one hand, the good [fish] they put into containers; the rotten, on the other hand, they cast out’
(Matt. 13, 48): do you also in the same way.[9]

The reader is cordially directed to Questions 600 through 604 in Barsanuphios on the
matter of Evagrius and Origenism.

We will present Evagrius’ cosmological doctrines under the following headings: his doctrine
of God, his doctrine of the Movement, his Christology, his cosmology, his doctrine of the
minds (noes), his anthropology, his angelology, his demonology and his eschatology. Such
extended presentation of Evagrius’ ascetical doctrines as we will make from the Kephalaia
Gnostica, we will make in the Digression in Volume II, in the context of Evagrius’ two
ascetical works that we there present and analyse in detail.

In the presentation below, parenthetical entries of the form (II, 83) refer to the century and
chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica being presented, here Century II, Chapter 83. A reference
in the body of the text to KG II, 83 has the same meaning of course. In the cases that the
reference has the form (II, 83—Greek fragment), we have provided our translation not of the
French text but of the parallel Greek fragment. These parallel Greek fragments, when
provided, are taken from the Greek texts provided in O’Laughlin or Dysinger and are also
given in English translation in footnotes to the corresponding chapters of the Kephalaia
Gnostica in Appendix 2 of Volume II.
We have not intended to give in this presentation a literal translation of each chapter of the
Kephalaia Gnostica, but to give, as we think, the sense of the chapter. Hence, this
presentation should be construed as an introduction to the cosmological thought of Evagrius.
Readers should refer to Appendix 2 of Volume II for a full English translation of the work.

previous | Table of Contents | next

[1] Stromateis.

[2] The reader could refer to Guillaumont for details.

[3] PO 28, 1.

[4] KG E.

[5] TPL E ‘Letter to Anatolios’.

[6] However, such chapters retain their rightful places in the translation in Appendix 2 of Volume II.

[7] Guillaumont.

[8] SO 30 pp. 185–212.

[9] Barsanuphios Vol. III, p. 146.

Chapter III -- 2
Since below we will refer to Peri Archon, the work of Origen which is the ultimate source of
many of Evagrius Pontikos’ cosmological doctrines, it behoves us to say a few words about
Origen, Peri Archon and the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

Origen (c.185–253) was an Alexandrine Christian who succeeded Clement of Alexandria to

the headship of the Catechetical School of Alexandria. He later studied under the pagan
philosopher, Ammonius Saccas (fl. 240), where one of his fellow students was Plotinus
(205–270), the founder of Neoplatonism and author of the Enneads.[1] While not the
inventor of the method of allegorical interpretation of Scripture—St Paul uses it in his
epistles and Clement, following Philo of Alexandria (fl. 20 bc–40 ad), precedes Origen in its
use—Origen was much given to the use of the method; however, he himself treated the
allegorical interpretation of Scripture as coexisting with the literal interpretation, except in
those cases where the passage of Scripture did not in his view accept a literal interpretation,
that is, except in those cases where a literal interpretation would be nonsensical, impossible
or absurd.

One of Origen’s works was Peri Archon, a systematic discussion of cosmology from, as he
himself thought, a Christian point of view. As we shall see, many of Evagrius’ cosmological
ideas ultimately derive from Peri Archon.

By the time of Evagrius Pontikos in the Egyptian desert at the end of the Fourth
Century, Origenism—an interpretation of Scripture based on Origen’s cosmology—had
become a serious movement among the monks, and there arose, in a historical evolution
which need not concern us here,[2] a reaction which ultimately led to the Anathemas of the
Fifth Ecumenical Synod in 553. Origen, Didymus the Blind and Evagrius Pontikos were
anathematized by name and the fifteen doctrinal Anathemas were proclaimed that we shall
discuss in detail in Section 11, below.

In proceedings of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod unconnected to Origenism, Vigilios, the Pope
of Rome, was deposed, and this has led to a certain reserve on the part of Roman Catholic
historians and theologians concerning the ecumenicity—the validity, the authoritativeness—
of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.
For example, concerning the Fifth Ecumenical Synod we read the following in Catholicism, a
book to which we shall refer in the next chapter:

…The council never won acceptance in the West, nor did it achieve the union Justinian hoped for in the
East. The pope did eventually approve it, but the doctrinal scope of that approval is not entirely clear. It
seems to have been restricted to the three canons which were directly concerned with the [Nestorian]
Three Chapters of Theodoret, Ibas, and Theodore. To the extent that the council has any longer term
doctrinal significance for the [Roman] Catholic faith, its importance may consist simply in its
reaffirmation of the earlier condemnations of Nestorianism. Otherwise, it is not an exceptionally bright

moment in the conciliar history of the [Roman Catholic] Church. [3]

An indication of the standing among Roman Catholic theologians of the condemnations by

the Fifth Ecumenical Synod of Origenism, and of Origen, Didymus the Blind and Evagrius
Pontikos, can be found in Catholicism’s treatment of Origenism: having to treat of
anthropology, the author invokes not the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod but the
earlier Anathemas of ‘[t]he provincial Council of Constantinople (543), which condemned
certain positions associated with followers of Origen, namely, that the human body is a
degrading place of exile to which preexisting souls have been consigned’.[4]

A further indication can be found in Cardinal Henri de Lubac’s study of Origen, Histoire et
Esprit, L’intelligence de l’Écriture d’après Origène,[5] where the author refers to ‘the list of
fifteen anathemas [against Origenism] prepared by the Fathers of the Council of 553 outside
their official sittings’[6] and quotes Diekamp as follows:

Neither the work of the local council of 543 nor even the extra-conciliar work of the [Fifth] Ecumenical
Council of 553 has been transformed into a definition of faith properly so-called by the mere fact of a

papal sanction, the very reality of which remains enveloped in obscurity. [7]

On the basis of this doubt among Roman Catholic scholars which began in the Nineteenth
Century concerning the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod against Origenism, there
developed a ‘revisionist’ trend in Roman Catholic Evagrian scholarship in the late Twentieth
Century which seeks to present an Evagrius who was never condemned by the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod or else condemned unjustly: an Evagrius, the proper interpretation of
whose works frees him from the charges contained in the Anathemas and who perhaps is
even a saint, just as he is in the Monophysite and Nestorian Churches.[8] Scholars espousing
such theories work largely within the Benedictine Order of the Roman Catholic Church.[9]

For a member of the Orthodox Church, however, such an approach to Evagrius founders on
the ecclesiological dimension of the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. For even if
one were to argue that the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod against Origenism
never happened, or happened outside the official sittings of the Synod, or were in error, or
did not include or intend Evagrius, the Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Synods, as we shall see
when we discuss the Anathemas in detail in Section 11, below, explicitly reaffirm the
doctrinal condemnations of Origenism and the personal condemnations of Origen, Didymus
the Blind and Evagrius by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod as having occurred. The Orthodox
Church accepts the seven Ecumenical Synods.

As Orthodox, we are obliged to accept the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in its entirety. We are
obliged to accept the validity of the condemnations of Origen, Didymus the Blind and
Evagrius Pontikos, and of the condemnations of the doctrinal positions presented in the
fifteen Anathemas against Origenism. We do not have the liberty of the Roman Catholic
theologian to wave them aside.

It might further be noted that although doubt has been cast on the Anathemas of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod against Origenism by scholars in the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman
Catholic Church itself has never officially repudiated those Anathemas.

Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church has never officially listed Evagrius Pontikos as a
saint. In this, see the Roman Martyrology, the official list of saints of the Roman Catholic
Church.[10]

[8] While the Syrian Churches have been aware of the version intégrale (S2) of the Kephalaia Gnostica for years, they
have preserved the saintedness of Evagrius by treating that version as inauthentic, as the result of tampering by heretics
with the true text of Evagrius, and by treating the version commune (S1) as the true text of Evagrius. They have never
taken the position that the version intégrale (S2) is authentic but susceptible of an interpretation which would—in the
context of their own theology, surely—be orthodox.

[9] For a survey article sympathetic to the ‘revisionist’ school, see Casiday.
[10] Martyrology

Chapter III -- 3

For an eye-witness account of Origenism in Palestine about the time of the Fifth Ecumenical
Synod, see the Lives of Cyril of Scythopolis.[1]

After the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, virtually all the works of Origen were destroyed. Of the
work which concerns us in this chapter, Peri Archon, there ultimately remained only the
translation into Latin (c.397) by Rufinus Tyrannius of Aquileia (c.345–411). However,
Rufinus’ translation cannot be considered either complete or accurate: feeling that heretics
had tampered with Origen’s own text, he suppressed some parts and modified other parts of
the text. For the omissions and original readings of the text of Origen, we are reduced to
relying on polemical quotations and paraphrases by St Jerome (c.342–420) and by other
opponents of Origen. Hardly a satisfactory situation for a study of Origen’s thought!

Early in the Twentieth Century, Koetschau attempted to restore the text of Peri Archon on
the basis of Rufinus’ translation and on the basis of the polemical sources just mentioned.
The result, translated into English by Butterworth, is the edition of Peri Archon on which we
are relying.[2] In it, we have the Latin text of Rufinus translated into English and, where
present, the Greek fragments collected by Koetschau, also translated into English. The result
cannot be considered to be a sure presentation of the original text of Origen.

In Koetschau’s recension of Peri Archon, the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod are
themselves treated as Greek fragments that bear witness to the original text of Origen’s work.
However, in view of the closeness of fit between the Anathemas and the Kephalaia Gnostica
of Evagrius,[3] Koetschau’s and Butterworth’s ascriptions of the Anathemas to Origen
himself—that is, as being based directly on Peri Archon, and not on the Kephalaia Gnostica
—are doubtful. For the Anathemas contain direct quotations from the Kephalaia Gnostica
and it does not seem to us typical of Evagrius to quote other authors, even Origen, directly.
Moreover, there is something circular about Koetschau’s, or even Butterworth’s approach:
they assume that the Anathemas are based directly on the original text of Peri Archon, and
they then use the Anathemas to restore ‘lost parts’ of Origen’s text. This is true also of many
of Koetschau’s other putative restorations of Peri Archon: Koetschau is not so much
restoring a faulty text as reading into it later views of what Origen actually said. To a certain
extent, his approach is useful and valid, but certainly it cannot then be used to determine the
provenance of the doctrines condemned by the Anathemas, or of similar doctrines.

Cardinal de Lubac, the Roman Catholic student of Origen, also asserts that the Anathemas
are not based on Origen himself.[4] However, we are reserved about Cardinal de Lubac’s
arguments which would exempt Origen completely from being the source of the doctrines
anathematized by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod: things are not so simple as Cardinal de Lubac
and the other Roman Catholic scholars whom he quotes would have us believe. Cardinal de
Lubac argues that St Jerome, because of his hostility and impassionedness, cannot be taken
at face value, nor the Emperor Justinian (483-565). While to a certain extent Cardinal de
Lubac may be right, we do not think that St Jerome and the Emperor Justinian can be
dismissed merely as self-interested fabricators. There is more to it than that: while the
Anathemas are, we think, based directly on the Kephalaia Gnostica, Evagrius’ own
cosmological doctrines derive in large part from Peri Archon, especially those of his
doctrines which were subject to anathematization: he has developed certain ideas of Origen,
perhaps through the intermediary of Didymus the Blind. Given the state of the texts,
however, the exact developmental relationship of Evagrius Pontikos’ ideas to those of
Didymus the Blind and to those of Origen will probably remain forever obscure. We shall see
these things as we go on.

It should be remarked that Koetschau, Butterworth and de Lubac did their work before the
publication of the version intégrale (S2) of the Kephalaia Gnostica, so that they could not
have been expected to know of its close correspondence to the Anathemas of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod.

Chapter III -- 4

1 The Evagrian Doctrine of God

To the First Good there is nothing opposed, because it is in its essence that it is the Good and
to the essence there is nothing that could be opposed (I, 1). The opposition is in the
attributes, for example, between hot and cold, and the attributes are in the bodies; the
opposition is therefore in the creatures (I, 2). This is a rejection of Manichæan dualism, of
any doctrine of an eternal principle of evil. There is implicit Evagrius’ philosophy of
oppositions and their role in creation. These oppositions, he is saying, are necessarily in the
attributes of created things and not in the essence of God; moreover, these oppositions
cannot even exist in ontological relation to the essence of God. Hence, there can be no
eternal principle of evil.

The mirror of the goodness of God, of his power and of his wisdom, is those things which in
the beginning have from nothing become something (II, 1). This of course is a doctrine of
creation ex nihilo on account of the goodness of God. Although Evagrius does not address the
issue, the notion that this was a free act of God seems implicit. However, as we shall see, the
Fifth Ecumenical Synod interprets Evagrius’ doctrine of the use by the Christ of what is
called the second natural contemplation to create the worlds as a doctrine different from
creation ex nihilo, so it is apparent that Evagrius’ views on the matter must be treated with
caution.

Every reasonable nature is a substance that knows and our God is knowable; he dwells in an
undivided fashion in those in whom he dwells, like terrestrial art, but he is superior to such
art in that he exists as a substance and not in the way that art exists, as skill or knowledge, in
that which has been made by the artisan on earth (I, 3). There is a class of creatures, called
reasonable beings, which are substances and which have the possibility of knowing, and God
is knowable by them. God is known in contemplation. The intuitive knowledge which comes
from contemplation is called gnosis. Moreover, God exists in his creatures in the way that the
art of the artist exists in his work of art, but with this difference, that God exists as a
substance, whereas the art or skill in a work of art does not.

It is not that which is God’s nature that he knows who sees the Creator in the harmony of
creation, but he knows the wisdom with which God has made everything; not the essential
wisdom, however, but the wisdom which appears in creatures, that which those who are
experts in these things are wont to call natural contemplation. And if that is so, what folly is
it that those have who say that they know the nature of God! (V, 51). On the surface, this
seems to be a statement by Evagrius that the nature of God is unknowable. We also see this
assertion in Evagrius’ Exhortation 2 To Monks 31:
 31 Just as an individual with many distinct parts is one in nature, so too the
Holy Trinity, even though it has distinctions both with regard to names and
hypostases, is one in nature. You could not comprehend the nature of God, not
even if you flew on wings. God is incomprehensible, just as he is also our creator.
[1]

However, this assertion must be taken in a restricted sense, for we have just seen Evagrius
say that God is knowable, and he will go on to say that the Holy Trinity is ‘essential gnosis’,
elsewhere stating clearly that the mind (nous) can attain to this essential gnosis. Hence, what
must be understood in the chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica under consideration is that the
nature of God is unknowable through his creatures, through the harmony of creation,
through the wisdom with which God has made his creatures. Moreover, the sense of the
passage of Exhortation 2 To Monks just given seems to be ‘comprehend the nature of God
intellectually or even, in an intuitive way, know fully’ in contradistinction to ‘see or know
God intuitively’.

‘Essential wisdom’ in the passage of the Kephalaia Gnostica under consideration appears to
be synonymous with ‘essential gnosis’, which we discuss below, and to have the sense of the
substance of God that is the source of the wisdom seen in creation.

We here see in Evagrius’ thought a remnant of the doctrines of the Cappadocians, those
doctrines which he took with him to Egypt; this remnant Evagrius later modified with his
doctrine of ‘essential gnosis’, all the while retaining the doctrine of the Cappadocians. For the
notion that the nature of God cannot be known from his creatures is definitely Cappadocian.

The next chapter is similar to this one:

All that has been produced proclaims ‘the most various wisdom of God’ (Eph. 3, 10), but
there is nothing among all the beings which teaches us concerning his nature (II, 21). Here it
is clear that ‘there is nothing among all the beings which teaches us concerning his [i.e.
God’s] nature’. That is, God’s nature cannot be known from his creatures even analogically.
God is known by the means of the contemplation of the corporeal nature (the material
bodies) and by means of the contemplation of the incorporeal nature (the reasonable beings)
and the two contemplations of these natures vivify the reasonable beings that enjoy the
contemplations (IV, 11). A reasonable nature is one that has mind (nous). Although created
beings cannot make known the nature of God, God can be known through his creatures. In
the case of the corporeal nature, it is the wisdom of God that is known, which is not, Evagrius
has already said, the ‘essential wisdom’ or substance of God. Evagrius is somewhat
ambiguous whether from the contemplation of the incorporeal nature—we take this to mean
the angelic powers—we learn the wisdom of God or else another aspect of God. On the one
hand, as creatures, they manifest the wisdom of God. On the other hand, Evagrius says that
God is more present in the angelic powers because he acts the more through them.[2]

In the Kephalaia Gnostica, Evagrius does not develop this last idea extensively enough for us
to be clear to what extent we learn more than the mere wisdom of God in the contemplation
of the angelic powers. However the very fact that he distinguishes between the two
contemplations and makes the contemplation of the angels the higher contemplation
indicates that in the contemplation of the angelic powers we learn something more about
God than we learn in the contemplation of the corporeal nature. Moreover, we will also find
that Evagrius teaches that from the contemplation of the angelic powers we learn the nature
of the Christ.

There is the important point here that natural contemplation vivifies, as does natural gnosis,
the reasonable being that participates in it.

God is everywhere, but he is not some part; he is everywhere because by his ‘wisdom full of
variety’ (Eph. 3, 10), he is in everything which he has produced; but he is not some part,
because he is not a creature (I, 43). Evagrius is very emphatic that it is the wisdom of God
that is present in his creatures. There is no doctrine here of the operations (energeies) of God
—the uncreated operations (aktistes energeies) of God of later Orthodox theology—which
uphold creation, although the Kephalaia Gnostica does have several undeveloped references
to that aspect of God’s providence. This concept of the wisdom of God present in his
creatures seems to us to be a somewhat Stoic element in Evagrius’ thought. For we think that
what Evagrius means is that the wisdom of God is precisely the reasons (logoi) of those
things which God has created. If this interpretation be correct, it would clarify how the
second natural contemplation, which corresponds to the wisdom of God present in his
material creatures, comes to be used by the Evagrian Christ in the creation of the various
worlds and bodies: the reasons (logoi) would correspond to the seed-reasons (spermatikoi
logoi) of the Stoics. However, we see in this doctrine an aspect also of Cappadocian theology,
for in Chapter I, above, we have already seen St Gregory of Nyssa to present St Macrina as
speaking of the presence of God in all creation both as Wisdom and as Providence.

It is said that God is in the corporeal nature as the architect is in the things that he has made,
and it is said that God is in the statue like the architect, if he should happen to make for
himself a statue of wood (VI, 82). This evidently is a chapter against the ‘anthropomorphites’
of the Egyptian desert of Evagrius’ day.[3] In a more general context, it clarifies by means of
a metaphor just how Evagrius conceives the wisdom of God to be in creation, as does the
following:

The separable art of the artisan contains his work and the wisdom of God contains all
creatures. And just as he who in logic separates the art of the artisan from the artisan breaks
his work, so he who in his thought separates the wisdom of God from him destroys all (II,
46). Nonetheless, this wisdom of God is not the essence or substance of God. It is an
operation of God. It might also be said to be the ‘essential form’ of creation.

Just as the light, while it makes us able to see all, does not have need of a light with which it
might be seen, so God, while he makes all things to see, does not have need of a light with
which he might be known; he, indeed, in his essence ‘is light’ (1 John 1, 5) (I, 35). We will see
in Chapter IV that St Augustine has a similar doctrine.

Just as it is not the same thing for us to see the light and to speak of the light, so it is not the
same thing to see God and to comprehend something intellectually concerning God (V, 26).
Evagrius is here distinguishing between the sight of God and intellectual knowledge
concerning God. Sight is direct intuitive knowledge (i.e. gnosis); intellectual knowledge is
knowledge based on propositions manipulated by human reason. We will encounter in
Chapter IV that great exponent of this second type of knowledge, St Thomas Aquinas. But
Evagrius himself treats all stages of contemplation as being intuitive, not propositional.
The present chapter is very important for a proper understanding of Evagrian contemplation
in all its stages: Evagrian contemplation is not discursive meditation, reflections on
memories, events, experiences and the goodness of God, but direct (‘silent’) intuitive
apprehension of the object of contemplation and, ultimately, of God himself. We will see as
we proceed in this chapter, but especially in Volume II, just how Evagrius understands this
silent contemplation, this intuitive apprehension of the object of contemplation.

The Holy Trinity is alone adorable for itself, it by which, in the final analysis, the incorporeal
nature and the corporeal nature from nothing have in the beginning become something (V,
50).

The nature of the Trinity is not known with ascents and descents; there are not any
underlying objects in the contemplation of the Holy Trinity, and its nature does not admit of
analysis, because he who analyses material bodies makes them consist of matter and form;
and if one resolves the incorporeal, or reasonable, nature, one reduces it to the common
contemplation and to the intelligible substance susceptible of an opposition. But it is not
thus that it is possible to know the nature of the Holy Trinity (V, 62). This is a very important
but very difficult statement, repeated in different words in Skemmata 18.[4] Much of the
latter part of Volume II of our work is dedicated to an elucidation of the principles involved.

A philosophical analysis of an object would make us reascend to the beginning of the object,
and the gnosis which involves measure makes us see the wisdom of the Creator; but it is not
according to these ways of seeing that we see the Holy Trinity. The Trinity, indeed, has no
beginning, and we do not say that the wisdom which is in the object is God, if, in the
philosophy of nature, the beginning agrees with the object of which it is the beginning. Such
a wisdom is a gnosis without substance, which appears only in the objects (V, 63). Here, the
wisdom which is in the object is the beginning (principle = Greek: arche?) of the object, and
since the beginning must agree with the object, to say that that wisdom is God is to say that
the object is God, something that is unacceptable. The last sentence appears to mean that the
wisdom which is present in creation—that which is apprehended by the ascetic in second
natural contemplation as the reason (logos) of the created object—is a wisdom which inheres
in the object itself but without the status of substance (like the art of the artist in the object
the artist makes). We will see in Chapter IV that St Augustine has a more elevated doctrine of
the reasons (logoi) of created objects in the Mind of God, and that, hence, he makes their
contemplation a more elevated attainment than Evagrius.

The Holy Trinity is not like a tetrad, a pentad or a hexad; indeed, these latter, being
numerical, are forms without substance; but the Holy Trinity is essential gnosis (VI, 10; see
also VI, 11–13). The Holy Trinity is beyond Platonic forms and so on. This is a very important
statement both for the nature of God and for the nature of the contemplation of God.

The Trinity is not placed with the contemplation of sensibles and of intelligibles and no more
is it counted with objects, because contemplation is a quality and the objects are creatures;
but the Trinity is essential gnosis alone (II, 47). This chapter, very important but very
difficult to understand, is saying that the Holy Trinity is classed neither with objects nor with
contemplations. It is not an object because objects are creatures. It is not a contemplation
because contemplations are qualities and the Trinity is ‘essential gnosis’.

The next chapter much the same meaning:

The Holy Trinity is not a thing which might be mixed with the contemplation that a man or
an angel makes; that, indeed, does not occur except with created beings. The former, the
Holy Trinity, will also be named, in a holy way, essential gnosis (V, 55).

Evagrius nowhere explains what he means by the oft-repeated phrase that the Holy Trinity is
essential gnosis, essential wisdom or even, once, essential contemplation. It seems to us that
he must be hinting, at least, that the higher forms of gnosis have the ontological status of
substance, and that the substance of God is ‘essential gnosis’. We do not think that he is
speaking in a metaphorical fashion. That seems to be foreign to his style. Moreover, the
placement in KG VI, 10, presented immediately above, of the phrase ‘…the Trinity is essential
gnosis’ in a passage clearly dedicated to ontology would make such an interpretation suspect.

It seems to us, however, that the doctrine that the Holy Trinity is essential gnosis must call
into question the orthodoxy of Evagrius’ Trinitarian theology. For nowhere that we know of
is the substance of God identified with gnosis except here.
It is in the context of the substantial nature of gnosis that the reader should consider the
Evagrian doctrine that gnosis changes the mind (nous) that participates in that gnosis:

Just as the senses are changed when they apprehend diverse qualities, thus also the mind
(nous) is changed when it ever gazes intently upon various contemplations (II, 83—Greek
fragment). What seems to be hinted at here is that the substance of the mind (nous) is
changed by gnosis, not merely the subjective disposition of the contemplating person. It is
well to remember that the mind (nous), being an intelligible substance, is not subject to the
laws that apply to the material creation. Mind (nous) and gnosis would both be intelligible
substances.

The mental representations of bodies have need of a pure mind (nous), the mental
representations of incorporeals have need of a mind (nous) that is more pure, and the Holy
Trinity has need of a mind (nous) that is more pure than those (V, 52). This lays out the
foundation of the Evagrian doctrine of the ascetic’s ascent to God in contemplation. In order
to ascend through the various stages of contemplation to the essential gnosis of the Holy
Trinity, the mind (nous) of the ascetic must be purified in successive stages. In its ascent, the
substance of the mind (nous) is changed by the gnosis to which it attains and then is further
purified to attain to the next higher stage of gnosis.

When we say that the substance of the mind (nous) appears in Evagrius to be changed by
gnosis, we mean, in Aristotelian language, accidentally. This change is more fundamental, it
would appear, than a mere change to the subjective disposition of the mind (nous), but not
so fundamental as to make the mind (nous) something other than it is. But consider, in this
regard, what Evagrius says concerning the change to the mind (nous) which enters into the
highest gnosis, the gnosis of the Holy Trinity:

When the mind (nous) receives the essential gnosis, then it also will be called God, because it
will also be able to found diverse worlds (V, 81). We take this to be a proposition of
asceticism and not of the Restoration.[5] For a mind (nous) to be ‘called God’ does not for
the Classical thinker mean that a moniker has been applied to that mind (nous) without
regard to that mind’s (nous’) nature. On the contrary, the assertion is very strong and has
much the same significance as in Luke 1, 35 (‘Therefore the holy thing born of you will be
called Son of God.’): to be called something is to be characterized as to one’s very essence.
However, we shall see that in the case of the Evagrian Christ, to be called God is to have the
status of God in an improper sense.

The notion of the substantial nature of the various forms of gnosis appears to be consistent
with what we see in Evagrius’ Christology, that the Evagrian Christ makes use of the second
natural contemplation in the creation of the different worlds, as if that contemplation were a
power or substance:

In the second natural contemplation we see the ‘greatly various wisdom’ (Eph. 3, 10) of
Christ, that which the Christ used to create the worlds; but in the gnosis which concerns the
reasonable beings, we have been instructed on the subject of his substance (II, 2). The gnosis
which concerns the second nature is the spiritual contemplation of which the Christ made
use in creating from it the nature of the bodies and the worlds (III, 26).

Here, perhaps, we see a Stoic or even Neoplatonic doctrine of the reasons (logoi) of the
things which are created: attainment to the gnosis or contemplation of the Holy Trinity gives
one the power to plant by means of the second natural contemplation the appropriate seed-
reasons (spermatikoi logoi) of the world that one wishes to create. This would be true both of
the Christ, who according to Evagrius has the gnosis of the Holy Trinity from his genesis, and
of the ascetic who entered into the gnosis of the Holy Trinity.

We see two other chapters in Evagrius’ cosmology where he seems to have made a direct and
non-Christian borrowing from Stoic cosmology:

Only fire is distinct of the four elements, by reason of that which in it is living (I, 30). One
part of the fire is capable of burning and the other incapable of burning; capable of burning
is that which burns the sensible matter, and incapable of burning that which is capable of
consuming the trouble of those who are troubled. And the first does not burn the whole
sensible mass, but the second is capable of burning the whole mass of trouble (III, 39). This
‘living’ is a divine attribute, and, normally, that which consumes ‘the trouble of those who are
troubled’ is the Holy Spirit. Hence, we here see a suggestion that the fire that we ordinarily
see in creation contains the Holy Spirit. This certainly would correspond to the Stoic doctrine
of the immanent divine fire, and it certainly is not Christian. However, all these points must
remain speculation, since in the Kephalaia Gnostica, or even elsewhere, Evagrius is not on
these matters explicit enough for us to ascertain precisely what he means.

[3] The reader might refer to Guillaumont Chapter 1, 1 for details of the controversy.

[5] Here and elsewhere we use the English words ‘Restoration’ or ‘Restoration of All Things’ to represent the Greek word
‘Apokatastasis’. See Section 9, below, ‘The Evagrian Eschatology’, for a discussion of the Restoration

Chapter III -- 5

We now turn to the persons of the Trinity in the Evagrian system. Some of what is said is
quite unclear and our interpretation is conjectural in those cases.

Unique is he who is without mediation, and this One, in return, by intermediaries is in all (I,
12). The Unique is he before whom no other being has been engendered, and after whom no
other being has to any further extent been engendered (IV, 16). We believe that this refers to
the Father. The doctrine of intermediaries in the first passage echoes Origen’s own doctrine
of the Trinity in Peri Archon. The second chapter might be construed to be based on Origen’s
doctrine in Peri Archon that the Son, and, a fortiori, the Holy Spirit, are creations of God the
Father, although they too are God. Of course, in Plotinus, ‘the One’ is, if we may put it that
way, the highest form of reality.

The uncreated is he to whom, because he exists by his essence, there is nothing that might be
anterior (VI, 5). This refers to the Father.

The Unity is it which now is known only by the Christ, and is it of which the gnosis is
essential (III, 3). This certainly refers to the Father. It would be a mistake to think that this
was just an odd way that Evagrius had of referring to the Trinity. Again we see a parallel with
Plotinus, although, as far as we know, Plotinus did not have a doctrine of ‘essential gnosis’.
In general, the more contemplative and mystical aspects of Evagrius’ thought, as opposed to
its cosmological aspects, seem quite similar to the doctrines of Plotinus. One can see this in
the next chapter:
The first nature is for the One, the second towards the One, and the same in the One (V, 85).
The One is the Father. The Monad or Unity is explicitly identified by Evagrius with the
Father: The Father alone knows the Christ, and the Son alone the Father (Matt. 11, 27), the
Christ as unique in the Unity and the Father as Monad and Unity (III, 1). The meaning of
first passage is that the reasonable beings were created ‘for the One’; the bodies that they
received after the Movement and the First Judgement[1] were given so that they might
progress ‘towards the One’; and the reasonable beings will be ‘in the One’, as naked minds
(noes) once again, in the Restoration. We will discuss what it means for the Christ to be
unique in the Unity in the section on Christology.

The Father is considered before the Son insofar as Father, before the Spirit insofar as
Principle; and he is anterior to the incorporeals and corporeals insofar as Creator (VI, 4). As
far as it goes, this seems perfectly Orthodox. However, we think that the interpretation that
Evagrius gives to these relations is different from how an Orthodox would understand the
words. We will see what Evagrius has to say about the Word of God when we discuss his
Christology. However, the following chapter manifests this concerning the relation of the
Father to the Holy Spirit, and perforce, therefore, concerning the nature of the Holy Spirit in
the Evagrian system:

The symbol of the dove which has appeared to the Baptist of the baptizable—is it that it is in
the first contemplation, or in the second or in the third? And, again, if it is possible that the
Unity might be imprinted in a form like that, still there is a danger that we might make that
known openly; but you will correct this symbol among the gnostics (IV, 27). The first
contemplation is the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. The second contemplation is the
contemplation of the angels. The third contemplation is the contemplation of created objects
or, better, the reasons (logoi) of those created objects. Evagrius’ rhetorical question is
therefore about the symbol of the dove which descended on Christ’s head at his Baptism in
the Jordan. Does it symbolize gnosis of the Unity, the Father? Does it symbolize gnosis of the
Holy Trinity? Does it symbolize gnosis of a reasonable being such as an angel? Does it
symbolize gnosis of the reason (logos) of a created object?

Underlying Evagrius’ thought is his doctrine of the mental representation (noema) which in
contemplation imprints an intelligible reality on the mind (nous), thus purveying the related
gnosis to the mind (nous).[2] Evagrius is doubting whether the gnosis of the Unity, a strictly
intelligible reality, can be transmitted to a mind (nous) in the sensible form of a dove—for
recall from the Gospel that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus ‘in bodily form as a dove’.[3]

Evagrius is implicitly identifying the Holy Spirit with the gnosis of the Unity in this passage.
This identification can also be seen in Skemmata 5:

5 The Christ is a reasonable nature having in himself that which is signified by the dove that alighted
upon him [cf. Matt. 3, 16].

As we shall see under the topic of Christology, below, Evagrius is in Skemmata 5 referring to
the essential gnosis of the Unity: that is what makes the Christ, the Christ. Evagrius is
asserting that the Holy Spirit is essential gnosis of the Unity; that essential gnosis of the
Unity is what he understands to be symbolized by the dove that descended on the Christ at
his Baptism;[4] and that is why he can raise the question whether ‘the Unity might be
imprinted in a form like that’, that is, in the form of a sensible dove. But we shall see that
Evagrius also identifies the essential gnosis of the Unity with the Word of God.

It is clear that Evagrius’ notion of ‘symbol’ here makes it ‘sacramental’: the dove conveys
gnosis of the Unity to the Christ; as a symbol, the dove has a much stronger connection to
what is symbolized than a mere picture.

Is Evagrius concerned about the ontological status, however, of the symbol of the dove, or
about the ontological status of that which is symbolized—the Holy Spirit?

The second sentence of the passage of the Kephalaia Gnostica under consideration indicates
that Evagrius is hiding his plain meaning. The reference to imprinting by the Unity, the
Father, in that sentence indicates that Evagrius views what descended on Christ in the
Jordan to be the gnosis of the Unity, not, as the Cappadocians would have it, the Third
Person of the Holy Trinity. We ourselves see in this passage a tendency of Evagrius to
subordinate the Holy Spirit to the Father or to treat it as an emanation or even gnosis of the
Father. But he has left the matter very ambiguous.
Is Evagrius denying the divinity of the Holy Spirit? Evagrius does say this in his Scholia on
Ecclesiastes 36:

I think that he who promises upright faith and who says that one of those from the Holy Trinity is a
creature delays, and that he who professes to confess that all things have come to be by means of God
and who again introduces automatism delays; and concerning the other dogmas, similarly. [5]

This scholium clearly rejects the notion that the Holy Spirit is created. However, it might be
remarked that in Peri Archon, Origen also had a similarly ambiguous Trinitarian theology:
the three Persons of the Holy Trinity were indeed God, but the Son and the Holy Spirit were
‘creatures’: they were God but the relation of engendering between the Father and them was
intermediate between full identity of substance and outright creation. This would be similar
to the Neoplatonic hierarchy of emanations starting from the One.

Before the Movement, God was good, powerful, wise, Creator of incorporeals, Father of the
logikoi and omnipotent; after the Movement, he became Creator of bodies, Judge, Governor,
Doctor, Pastor, Merciful and Long-Suffering, and even Door, Way, Lamb, High Priest, along
with the other names which are said by modes. And he is Father and Principle even before
the genesis of incorporeals: Father of Christ and Principle of the Holy Spirit (VI, 20). The
Movement is a central concept in the Evagrian cosmological system; we shall discuss it
separately in the next section. The significance of what is said here is for Evagrius’ doctrine
of God. When Evagrius speaks of something as existing or happening by modes, he means
contingently, in creation.

In the present chapter, all the epithets applied to God after the Movement are epithets
normally applied to the Christ. This is not accidental: we shall see that after the Movement
God works exclusively through the Christ.

The Father is the generator of essential gnosis (VI, 28). The Father is he who has a
reasonable nature which is united to the gnosis of the Trinity (VI, 29). The Father is he who
has a reasonable nature which is united to the contemplation of beings (VI, 30). We are not
sure how to put these three chapters together. The first seems to make of the Father the
generator of the substance of the Holy Trinity—for the Holy Trinity, according to Evagrius, is
essential gnosis—but the second and third seem to make of the Father something like an
angel: they might be referring not to God but to something like a human spiritual father or,
in Evagrius’ terminology, a gnostic.

Engendered is that which has been engendered by something, as by a father (VI, 31).
Engendered is that which has been engendered by something as by a creator (VI, 32). The
first ‘engendered’ means ‘begotten’; the second ‘engendered’ means ‘created’. Professor
Guillaumont considers that the two words, the same in Syriac, are based on two different
words in the original Greek, with the meanings given.[6]

The right of the Lord is also called hand, but his hand is not also called right. And his hand
receives increase and decrease, but that does not also occur to the right (II, 12). The hand is
the Christ, through whom God works. Elsewhere, we learn that the ‘right’ refers to the Unity,
the Father: The anointing either indicates the gnosis of the Unity or designates the
contemplation of beings. And if more than the others Christ is anointed, it is evident that he
is anointed with the gnosis of the Unity. On account of that, he alone is said ‘to be seated at
the right’ (Mark 16, 19) of his Father, the right which here, according to the rule of the
gnostics, indicates the Monad and the Unity (IV, 21). He who alone is seated ‘at the right’ of
the Father alone has the gnosis of the right (II, 89). This is the uniqueness of the Christ in
the Unity that is referred to in KG III, 1, above.

[2] We will discuss this notion is great detail in Volume II, especially in the commentary on the last chapters of On the
Thoughts.

[5] Ekklesiasten p. 122, ll. 16–19. ‘Delays’ here means ‘errs’ or ‘sins’; Evagrius’ diction depends on the passage of
Scripture he is interpreting. ‘Automatism’ is the doctrine that the creation is the spontaneous work of chance.

[6] See the footnotes to the relevant chapters in PO 28, 1

Chapter III -- 6

We now look briefly at the providence of God:

The providence of God accompanies the freedom of the will; but his judgement considers the
order of the reasonable beings (VI, 43). The providence of God is double; one part is said to
preserve the constitution of the bodies and incorporeals, and the other, to push the
reasonable beings from vice and from ignorance towards virtue and gnosis (VI, 59).

The Lord has pitied him to whom he has given spiritual gnosis, if ‘The righteous walks in the
light and the senseless in the darkness.’ (Eccl. 2, 14.) But the Lord has pitied the senseless
one also, in that it is not quickly that he torments him, or in that he pushes him from vice
towards virtue (I, 72). This push ‘accompanies the freedom of the will’: The providence of
God accompanies the freedom of the will; but his judgement considers the order of the
logikoi (VI, 43).

Chapter III -- 7

That, in essence, is Evagrius’ doctrine of God. It is a monotheistic Trinitarian doctrine with

some peculiarities about the nature of the substance of the Holy Trinity and about the
relations among the persons in the Trinity, which peculiarities leave us with some
reservations about whether, ultimately, Evagrius had an Orthodox Trinitarian theology.

Professor Guillaumont remarks that Evagrius’ Letter to Melania,[1] which we do not discuss
systematically in this work, manifests a ‘system more emanationist and pantheist than that,
fundamentally creationist, which is expressed in the Kephalaia Gnostica’.[2] Professor
Guillaumont also remarks that Evagrius ‘summarizes his thought rather hastily in this letter’.
[3] Moreover, he asserts that Evagrius’ Trinitarian theology is perfectly orthodox.[4] We are
not so sure that we agree on this last point. We think that the Kephalaia Gnostica shows a
marked subordinationist tendency in Trinitarian theology, although that tendency is
obscured by the peculiarities of Evagrius’ heterodox Christology and by his relative silence on
the Word and the Holy Spirit.

This subordinationist tendency can be found in Evagrius’ emphasis on the contemplation of

the Unity, which Unity is identified in the Kephalaia Gnostica with the Father, and in the
fact that in the Restoration of All Things, then the Christ will contemplate the Father, along
with all the other reasonable creatures, as the first-born among many brethren, and this
although the Evagrian Christ, if we can put it that way, is united to the Word of God from his
genesis.

This subordinationist tendency can also be found in the doctrine that the Holy Trinity is
essential gnosis, for it is also occasionally said in the Kephalaia Gnostica that the Word of
God is essential gnosis, or essential gnosis of the Unity. These seem rather odd propositions
for Evagrius’ Trinitarian theology to be considered Orthodox. For the proposition that the
Word of God is essential gnosis of the Unity, that is, of the Father, seems to imply a
subordination of the Word to the Father greater than would be implied by the subordinate
relation of Son to Father in the context of identity of substance and identity of properties
except for the property of being engendered (the Son) and engendering (the Father), which is
the doctrine of St John of Damascus. Of course, it is possible that Evagrius intends by
‘essential gnosis’ the substance of the Holy Trinity, and in referring to the Word of God as
essential gnosis of the Unity is referring to the substance of the Word. But even then, treating
the substance of God as gnosis seems un-Orthodox.

The importance of the assertion in the Kephalaia Gnostica that the Word of God is essential
gnosis of the Unity can be seen in this: The Kephalaia Gnostica consistently refers to the
union to the gnosis of the Unity, from the moment of its genesis, of the mind (nous) which
became the Christ, and seldom to the union of that mind (nous) to the Word of God. The
Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, however, consistently refer to the union to the
Word of God of the mind (nous) which supposedly became the Christ, and almost not at all
to the union of that mind (nous) to the gnosis of the Unity.

A subordinationist tendency in Evagrius Pontikos’ thought is consistent with what we can

understand from Peri Archon of Origen’s own thought: he was taxed with subordinationism
by his opponents, and this subordinationism comes through even in Rufinus’ translation.[5]
An emphasis on the Father as the highest Person of the Holy Trinity is certainly consistent
with Origen’s thought in Peri Archon.

Moreover, although Origen himself does not develop such a mystical doctrine in Peri
Archon, Evagrius’ emphasis on the gnosis of the Unity as the end of the mystical endeavour
is certainly consistent with the distinctly subordinationist thought of Plotinus in the
Enneads.[6]
As concerns the Holy Spirit, we saw two chapters on the nature of fire that made us wonder
about Evagrius’ pneumatology, and we saw another chapter on the symbol of the dove that
made us wonder even more about that pneumatology. If the ‘living’ aspect of fire to which we
saw Evagrius refer is to be understood as the Holy Spirit present in creation, then a good
case could be made that Evagrius is ‘emanationist and pantheist’ in the Kephalaia Gnostica.
The problem is that these aspects of his thought Evagrius does not develop at such length in
the Kephalaia Gnostica that we can say just exactly what it is that he means.

Chapter III -- 8
2 The Evagrian Doctrine of the Movement

If time is considered in regard to genesis and destruction, then the genesis of the
incorporeals is timeless, because a destruction is not anterior to this genesis (VI, 9). Evagrius
means that the genesis of the minds (noes), which we might crudely say was God’s first act,
occurred outside time, since time did not yet exist.

Before turning to the topic of time, let us point out that for Evagrius, this genesis of the
minds (noes) comprises all the minds (noes) that ever have been or will be. These are all the
minds (noes) that subsequently became angels, demons or men. There are no other
categories of minds (noes), and all the minds (noes) had their genesis in this single act of
God.

As for time, what Evagrius seems to have in mind is the philosophical, and probably
Aristotelian, notion that time does not exist without change, in particular without generation
and destruction.[1] Since, however, Evagrius seems to be thinking, there was no destruction
before the genesis of the minds (noes), there could not have existed time. This use of the
concept of destruction must be considered in view of Evagrius’ doctrine, to be discussed
under the heading of eschatology, that in the Restoration of all Things, all the worlds will be
destroyed and then all the minds (noes) will return to the state of contemplation that they
had just after their genesis.

It should be understood that while for Evagrius all the minds (noes) had their genesis in the
same act of God, they do not all appear to be equivalent. This is important, for we shall see in
Evagrius’ eschatology that according to Evagrius, in the Restoration all the minds (noes) will
lose their individuality and become an henad (enas)[2] without personal differentiation, an
henad which enjoys the contemplation of the Monad or Unity which is God. However, we
shall see in Evagrius’ Christology that the mind (nous) which is the Christ has the Word of
God in him from the moment of his genesis. This seems to be a special characteristic of the
mind (nous) which is the Christ. Moreover, in Evagrius’ demonology we shall see that the
mind (nous) which became the Devil, that mind (nous) which took the initiative of the
Movement now being explained, is a specific mind (nous): ‘He who has been created to be
the mockery of the angels’ (Job 40, 19; 41, 25) of God, would he not be he who had the
initiative of the Movement and in the beginning has overstepped the borders of vice, and on
account of that has been called ‘the commencement of the creatures of the Lord’ (Job 40, 19)
(VI, 36)? The Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod that we shall study take the position
that the Origenist system they are condemning posits that all the minds (noes) were united
to the Word of God before the Movement (Anathema 2). The Fathers of the Synod, however,
do not go into detail and do not address the question whether all the minds (noes) were
equivalent in the contemplation of the Unity before the Movement, or whether the Evagrian
Christ was united to the Word of God in a distinctive way.

In Peri Archon, Rufinus presents Origen’s views on the matter as follows:

…that soul of which Jesus said, ‘No man taketh from me my soul’ [John 10, 18],
clinging to God from the beginning of creation and ever after in a union
inseparable and indissoluble, as being the soul of the wisdom and word of God
and of the truth and the true light, and receiving him wholly, and itself entering
into his light and splendour, was made with him in a pre-eminent degree one
spirit, just as the apostle promises to them whose duty it is to imitate Jesus, that
‘he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit’ [1 Cor. 6, 17].[3]

This suggests to us that in Origen, at least as Rufinus wishes to present him, the mind (nous)
that became the Christ was distinguished from all the other minds (noes) in a special way.[4]

The first Movement of the reasonable beings is the separation of the mind (nous) from being
with the Unity which is in it (III, 22). After their genesis, the minds (noes) contemplate the
Unity outside time. Then the mind (nous) that is to become the Devil takes the initiative of
the Movement; that initiative is the separation of the mind (nous) from being with the Unity
which is in it. All the other minds (noes), with the exception of the mind (nous) which is to
become the Christ, to a greater or lesser extent follow the initiative of the mind (nous) that is
to become the Devil. The broad outlines of this doctrine of the Movement are to be found in
Peri Archon, but there the Movement does not seem to be a single act as it is in Evagrius: in
Peri Archon the minds (noes) seem to commit acts of negligence individually and, so to say,
at various times.[5]

It is not the Unity which on its own part has set itself in motion; but it was set in motion by
the receptivity of the nous, which, by its negligence, turned its face away from the Unity and
by the fact of being deprived of the Unity engendered ignorance (I, 49). This is the Evagrian
version of Original Sin. This act of negligence was a single act initiated by the mind (nous)
which became the Devil. The Evagrian doctrine of the Movement is more highly articulated
than we find in Peri Archon and set more clearly into a framework of the experience of
contemplation.

All that which has been produced has been produced for the gnosis of God, but among the
beings some are first while others are second. Gnosis is more ancient than the first beings,
the reasonable beings that were created before the Movement, and the Movement is more
ancient than the second beings, the bodies and worlds that the reasonable beings were given
after the Movement (I, 50). We now begin to consider the consequences of the Movement.
First, note that Evagrius states that gnosis is more ancient than the first beings, which are
precisely the minds (noes) whose genesis we have just described. This passage seems to
indicate, then, that gnosis can exist without a mind (nous) which experiences it, and this
accords with our hypothesis that for Evagrius gnosis is a substance. Recall that the Holy
Trinity is essential gnosis.

The second beings referred to are the bodies and worlds that are given to the minds (noes)
after the Movement according to their degree of negligence in turning their face away from
the Unity, that is, according to the degree of ignorance they engendered in themselves. These
bodies are of various types.

The phrase that all that has been produced has been produced for the gnosis of God, cannot
be interpreted to mean that all creation has the potential to know God. For Evagrius is
elsewhere quite clear that only minds (noes) can know God. The creation that is without
mind (nous) can only manifest the wisdom of God, just as the lifeless object created by an
artist can only manifest the art of the artist, without itself knowing the artist.

Just as one cannot say that there might be a mind (nous) more ancient that another mind
(nous), so also the spiritual bodies are not more ancient that the praktika bodies, if the
change which is the cause of the two organa, or bodies, is unique (III, 45). The spiritual
bodies are the bodies of angels. The praktika[6] bodies are the bodies of men, although as
we shall see it might be more accurate to say that the praktika bodies are the souls of men.
The unique change being referred to is the Movement and its result. We can now introduce
the idea of the judgement of God after the Movement:

The first gnosis which is in the reasonable beings is that of the Holy Trinity; then there was
the movement of liberty, the providence helping and not abandoning, and then the
judgement and, anew, the movement of liberty, the providence, the judgement and that up to
the Holy Trinity. Thus a judgement is interposed between the movement of liberty and the
providence of God (VI, 75). After the Movement, God—in his Christ, as we shall see in the
next section—judges the minds (noes) and gives to each of them a body according to its
degree of negligence. The angels have less negligence; men, more; the demons, still more;
and the Devil, the most of all. This First Judgement is a single act of the Christ; it is the
unique change referred to in the previous chapter. There are many subsequent judgements,
reincarnations, movements and acts of divine providence, until finally all minds (noes) are
returned to the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration of All Things; that is the
significance of the phrase ‘and that up to the Holy Trinity’. However, there is a judgement
interposed between each movement and each act of God’s providence. This is largely a
faithful rendition of Peri Archon, with the exception that, as Rufinus presents him, Origen
does not seem to conceive of the First Judgement as a single act, just as he does not seem to
conceive of the Movement as a single act. Evagrius is in this chapter vague about the role of
divine providence after the judgement; he has in mind that God’s ultimate purpose is to
return all the minds (noes) to the contemplation of the Unity, not merely to punish each
mind (nous) for its negligence. Implicit in this chapter is Evagrius’ doctrine of reincarnation,
which he has taken from Peri Archon and developed: after each life there is a judgement, the
granting of a body and a world, and then the application of providence to help the newly
reincarnated mind (nous) return to the Holy Trinity.
In the Evagrian cosmology, a world is created for each type of body. That is, the First
Judgement does not result just in the creation of a body for each mind (nous), but also in the
creation of a world appropriate to that body. Thus, in Evagrius’ system, the creation of a
world is a consequence of his version of Original Sin, for before the Movement all the minds
(noes) were engaged in direct contemplation of the Unity as naked minds (noes) without
bodies and without worlds. That is why, when in the Restoration of All Things all the minds
(noes) will return to the contemplation of the Unity, all the worlds will be destroyed. This is
one of the propositions that was explicitly condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, in
Anathema 14.

Although Origen certainly agrees with the doctrine that the position of a mind (nous) after
the Movement and the First Judgement depends on that mind’s (nous’) degree of negligence
in the Movement,[7] he does not have a doctrine of the creation after the Movement, in the
First Judgement, of a world for each body. Origen seems in Peri Archon to attempt to
combine the Stoic concept of a never-ending succession of identical worlds towards the past
and towards the future with the Platonic doctrine of the eternal act of creation of the one
world and the fall of the souls into bodies; with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection;
and with his own doctrine of the Restoration of All Things. Needless to say, the result is far
from perspicuous! But it is on this foundation that Evagrius builds his own more highly
articulated system. Moreover, the doctrine of successive judgements, incarnations and
providences is the foundation of the doctrine, found in both Peri Archon and the Kephalaia
Gnostica, of the mobility of the minds (noes) among the various orders of angels, men and
demons that was condemned in extenso by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod (Anathemas 4, 5, 6,
and 12).

The Movement is the cause of vice and virtue is destructive of vice, but virtue is the daughter
of names and of modes and the cause of these latter things is the Movement (I, 51). This
should now be clear: the Movement introduced negligence and ignorance, and is therefore
the cause of vice. Virtue is destructive of vice but conceptually, virtue only exists in the
worlds which were created after the Movement, in which worlds things exist contingently:
this is the significance of ‘names and modes’.

When that in which we must be was separated, it engendered that in which we are; and when
that which is in us is mixed, it will lift up that which will be lifted up with number (I, 8). We
have placed this chapter here to indicate the relation of Evagrius’ doctrine of the Restoration
to his doctrine of the Movement. What Evagrius means here is that when we, the minds
(noes), through negligence separated ourselves from the Unity, our bodies and the worlds in
which we have our bodies were engendered. (‘That in which we must be’ is the Unity; it was
separated by our negligence.) When, however, in the Restoration of All Things we return to
the contemplation of the Unity, not as individual minds (noes) but as an henad of minds
(noes) without individual distinction (this is the significance of the lifting up of number),
then our bodies will also taken from us (our bodies are what will be lifted up with number).
This is another proposition that was explicitly condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, in
Anathema 14.

We now turn to Evagrius’ Christology.

[1] We suspect that here the underlying Greek word for ‘destruction’ must have been phthora, which might also be
translated ‘corruption’.

[2] ‘Henad’ is a synonym for ‘monad’ or ‘unity’. It is used in this way: it refers to the condition of the minds (noes) after
the Restoration, or even before the Movement, when they are, or were, united the one to the other in the contemplation
of God without individual or personal distinctions. ‘Monad’ (capitalized) refers, as a synonym for ‘Unity’, to God the
Father.

[4] We need not be detained here by the difference in terminology between Evagrius’ ‘mind (nous)’ and Origen’s ‘soul’.

[6] Literally, ‘practical’.

[7] Indeed, he even uses the word ‘negligence’: loc. cit

Chapter III -- 9

3 The Evagrian Christology

The first-born is he before whom no other has been engendered, and after whom others have
been engendered (IV, 20). This refers to the Word of God. Given that the minds (noes) had
their genesis, from what we have seen, in a single act of God, and given that the Evagrian
Christ is one of those minds (noes), it cannot refer to the mind (nous) that became the Christ.
Below, we will see this confirmed.

The next assertion is clearly Christological but ambiguous: There is in this one alone who is
adorable, he who uniquely has the Unique (II, 53). What is here unclear is whether this
refers to the Word of God—the second person of the Holy Trinity, the gnosis of the Unity—or
to the mind (nous) that became the Christ and which alone has the gnosis of the Unity, which
gnosis is the Word of God. Based on other passages of Evagrius, it refers to the Christ and
not to the Word of God.

The Father alone knows the Christ, and the Son alone the Father (cf. Matt. 11, 27), the Christ
as unique in the Unity and the Father as Monad and Unity (III, 1). This is clearly
Christological. However, one should be careful: the Christ is a mind (nous) like all the other
minds (noes) and is in KG IV, 18, presented just below, explicitly stated by Evagrius not to be
God or the Word of God ‘in the beginning’. If ‘Son’ is not a mistake somewhere in the line of
transmission and translation, then the term does not here have the meaning, ‘Second Person
of the Holy Trinity’: we will see just below that Evagrius has a doctrine of the attribution of
divine properties to the created mind (nous) which is properly the Christ on account of that
mind’s (nous’) union with the Word of God. Here also we see the doctrine that the mind
(nous) that is the Christ is unique in the Unity. We understand this in the context of other
chapters to mean that whereas the Christ was the only mind (nous) not to participate in the
negligence of the Movement and not to turn his face away from the Unity, this is not
something that happened by chance to a chance mind (nous) who thus became the Christ,
but might be said to be because the Evagrian Christ had the Word of God in him in a special
way from the moment of his genesis as a mind (nous). A more cautious interpretation of the
passage would be that it merely asserts that now the Christ is the only mind (nous) to enjoy
the (full) contemplation of the Unity, the Father, and that only because the mind (nous) that
became the Christ did not participate in the negligence of the Movement.

The intelligible anointing is the spiritual gnosis of the Holy Unity, and the Christ is he who is
united to this gnosis. And if that is so, the Christ is not the Word in the beginning, so that he
who has been anointed is not God in the beginning, but that one on account of this one is the
Christ, and this one on account of that one is God (IV, 18). The first sentence of this chapter
says that that which makes the Christ, Christ (‘anointed’), is the anointing with the gnosis of
the Unity, the supreme gnosis as we have seen. The explanation is this of the connective ‘And
if that is so’ which leads into the statement that the Christ is not the Word in the beginning:
the spiritual gnosis of the Holy Unity to which the Christ is united is identified by Evagrius
with the Word of God; for that reason he can say that since the Christ is united to the gnosis
of the Unity, he is ‘not the Word in the beginning’ and ‘not God in the beginning’. This is a
clear denial that the Christ is the incarnate Word of God. Note that Evagrius states that the
Christ is ‘united to this gnosis’:[1] the implication is that the Christ is a mind (nous) united to
the Word of God. Recall that the Holy Trinity is considered by Evagrius to be essential
gnosis: the Word is to be construed in this fashion as essential gnosis of the Unity or Father.
Since the Christ, according to Evagrius, is not the Word in the beginning, he is equally not
God in the beginning—‘but that one on account of this one is the Christ, and this one on
account of that one is God.’ It is a little difficult to discern what ‘that one [i.e. the former]’
and ‘this one [i.e. the latter]’ each refer to. However, this final clause is quoted verbatim as
part of Anathema 8 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod and in Anathema 8, the context makes it
clear that ‘that one’ refers to the Christ and ‘this one’ refers to the Word of God: the Word of
God is the Christ on account of its union with the mind (nous) which is properly the Christ;
the Christ is God on account of the Word of God to which that created mind (nous) called the
Christ is united. The present passage of the Kephalaia Gnostica has the same meaning: the
Christ is not the Word in the beginning, so he is not God in the beginning, but he is God by
union with the Word of God. Moreover, the Word of God is the Christ on account of its union
with the created mind (nous) which is the Christ proper.

KG VI, 14 has the same meaning:

The Christ is not connatural with the Trinity. Really, he is not also essential gnosis; but he
alone always has the essential gnosis inseparably in himself. But the Christ—I (Evagrius)
wish to say: he who is come with the Word of God and who in spirit is the Lord—is
inseparable from his body and by union he is connatural with his Father, because he, the
Father, also is essential gnosis (VI, 14). The Christ is a mind (nous) which has the essential
gnosis inseparably in himself—we have seen that this is tantamount to his having the Holy
Trinity or Unity in him—and which ‘is come with the Word of God’. One would have to
labour to assert that what is being referred to is the human nature of the Christ, taken
himself to be the incarnate Word of God: it is clear from what we have seen of the creation of
the minds (noes) that Evagrius has a completely different Christology from the Orthodox
one. Moreover, we shall see that the (resurrection) body that the Christ has, has a completely
different sense with Evagrius.

The relation between the Word of God and the Father is quite ambiguous here: while the
Christ has the Word of God in him, it is by union with the Father that he is connatural with
his Father. Moreover, although the Christ is connatural with his Father, he is not connatural
with the Holy Trinity. The meaning of the chapter is this: by union with the Word of God,
that is, by union to or anointing with the gnosis of the Unity or Father, the Christ is
connatural with his Father, although he is not connatural by essence or substance with the
Holy Trinity.[2] Note both that the statement that the Christ ‘is not also essential gnosis, but
he alone always has the essential gnosis inseparably in himself’ really only makes sense if
‘essential gnosis’ is the substance of God; and that, moreover, the statement excludes the
possibility that the Christ is the incarnate Word of God.

Let us look again at the notion that the Christ is connatural with his Father on account of his
union with the Word of God, although he is not connatural with the Holy Trinity by essence.
In contradistinction to the Orthodox doctrine, what Evagrius is saying is that the created
mind (nous) called the Christ has divine attributes on account of its union with the Word of
God, whereas the Word of God has the attributes of the Christ on account of its union with
the mind (nous) called the Christ. This is not the Orthodox doctrine of the transfer of
attributes between the human and divine natures of the incarnate Word of God, taught for
example by St John of Damascus: the Evagrian doctrine depends not on the two natures of
the incarnate Word of God but on the union between a created mind (nous) and the Word of
God, taken to be gnosis of the Unity.

The above passages render problematical the Christology found in Part 2 of the Letter to
Melania:[3] the two Christologies are simply inconsistent. There is no notion in the
preceding passages of the Kephalaia Gnostica that the Word of God has incarnated into
human flesh: in the Kephalaia Gnostica, the connection between the mind (nous) which is
the Christ and the Word of God is that of a union between a created mind (nous) and the
Word of God, to be understood as the gnosis of the Unity.
While it is far beyond the scope of this work to discuss the difficulties raised by the Letter, we
wonder whether the Letter reflects Evagrius’ (mature) thinking; or whether it is a work by
another hand that has been given his name and the name of Melania in the Syriac
manuscript tradition; or, assuming that the work is genuine, whether it has suffered the
same fate as the version commune (S1) of the Kephalaia Gnostica: a translator who has
made wholesale changes in the interests of ‘orthodoxy’. For not only is the Christology of the
Letter inconsistent with that of the Kephalaia Gnostica, but the passages in Part 1 of the
Letter concerning the relations among the body, soul and mind of man, and their relations
with the Son and Holy Spirit and, through them, the Father,[4] while in some respects
illuminating, diverge from the doctrine of the Kephalaia Gnostica. This is particularly
evident in the passage concerning the assimilation in the Restoration of the body and the
soul of man into the Godhead along with the mind (nous),[5] and in the imagery, that
Evagrius does not use in the Kephalaia Gnostica, of the minds’ (noes’) becoming one with
the Godhead in the way that rivers flow into the sea, so ‘that in the unification of the rational
beings with God the Father, they will be one nature in three persons, without addition or
subtraction’:[6] the doctrines as expressed in the Letter are simply not consistent with the
doctrines in the Kephalaia Gnostica of the spiritual resurrection body, later put off in the
Restoration, which spiritual resurrection body is not our ordinary human body transformed;
and of the henad of naked minds which contemplate the Unity both before the Movement
and after the Restoration.

Our view is that the Kephalaia Gnostica should be taken as the normative expression of
Evagrius’ thought. It is the work that in Antiquity was quoted and disputed. However, by
contrast, there have been saved as far as we know no Greek fragments that bear witness to
the Letter.[7] There is a small exception in that a few passages of the Letter parallel chapters
of the Kephalaia Gnostica, but this could very well indicate that the Neoplatonist author of
the Letter had merely read, but not fully assimilated, the Kephalaia Gnostica.

[7] We ignore here such questions as the masculine gender of the addressee of the Letter

Chapter III -- 10

We now begin to see some fundamental features of the Evagrian Christology:

The Christ is he who alone has in himself the Unity and has received the judgement of the
reasonable nature (III, 2). Only the Christ now has the Unity, the Father, in himself, and to
him has been given the judgement of the minds (noes) after the Movement. This comprises
the First Judgement after the Movement, when all the minds (noes) were given bodies and
worlds, and all subsequent judgements which, according to Evagrius, will occur until the
Resurrection:

The transformation of bodies, of regions and of worlds makes known ‘the just judgement’ (2
Thess. 1, 5) of our Christ; the demons, who battle against virtue, make known his long-
suffering; and his compassion, above all, those who are objects of his providence without
being worthy of it (II, 59). ‘The transformation of bodies, of regions and of worlds’ refers to
the intermediate judgements between the First Judgement after the Movement, and the
Resurrection. This is a doctrine that to be intelligible presupposes a doctrine of
reincarnation. It forms the basis of Evagrius’ doctrine of the mobility of the minds (noes)
among the various orders of angels, men, souls and demons that is addressed in Anathema 5
of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

We are now in a position to address some very difficult aspects of the Evagrian soteriology:

The Christ is inherited and he inherits, but the Father is inherited only (IV, 78).

The heritage of Christ is the gnosis of the Unity; and, if all should become coheirs of Christ,
all will know the Holy Unity. But it is not possible that they should become his coheirs if they
have not previously become his heirs (III, 72).

The heir of Christ is he who knows the mental representations of all the beings posterior to
the First Judgement (IV, 4).

The ‘coheir of Christ’ (Rom. 8, 17) is he who arrives in the Unity and takes delight in the
contemplation with the Christ (IV, 8).
If one is the heir and another is the heritage, it is not the Word who inherits, but the Christ
who inherits the Word, which is the heritage, because whoever inherits thus unites himself to
the heritage and because the Word of God is free of union (IV, 9).

The preceding passages are difficult to grasp. In the first chapter, KG IV, 78, the Father is
inherited, because he is inherited as the gnosis of the Monad or Unity in which a mind
(nous) can participate. That participation in that gnosis is the inheritance. To be able to
inherit the Father in this way—to become thus a ‘coheir’ with the Christ—a mind (nous) must
first come to the gnosis related to the contemplation of the beings posterior to the First
Judgement after the Movement (cf. KG III, 72 and IV, 4). These beings are all the bodies of
all the minds (noes), and all the corresponding worlds, that were created by the Christ in the
First Judgement. To participate in this latter contemplation, which Evagrius calls second
natural contemplation, is to inherit the Christ. This is the program of mystical ascent which
can be realized either in this world through ascesis or in other worlds after death. It
continues up to the attainment of the state of the ‘coheir of Christ’, wherein the mind (nous)
attains to the gnosis or contemplation of the Unity (cf. KG IV, 8).

In the fourth chapter, KG IV, 9, the Christ inherits the Word of God because he too, a mind
(nous) like all the others, receives the gnosis of the Unity. But the fact that the Christ inherits
the Word of God excludes the possibility that he is the incarnate Word of God: we again see
the non-Orthodox nature of the Evagrian Christology.

The two chapters, KG III, 72 and IV, 9, taken together demonstrate clearly that the Word of
God is to be identified with the gnosis of the Unity.

The Christ is he who from the essential gnosis and from the incorporeal nature and from the
corporeal nature has appeared to us; and he who says two Christs or two Sons resembles him
who calls the wise man and wisdom two wise men or two wisdoms (VI, 16). The significance
of this passage is that in the Evagrian system, the Christ has adopted by incarnation not only
a human body, but also a body appropriate to each of the worlds which he has created.
Moreover, the passage accounts for the theophanies in the Old Testament in which God
appears to men through the ‘Angel of Presence’: that Angel of Presence is the Christ in his
incarnation as an angel, prior to his incarnation as man. However, Evagrius says, despite
that, there is only one Christ. We take the statement that the Christ has appeared to us from
‘the essential gnosis’ to mean that the Christ is united to the gnosis of the Unity; we have
already seen that other chapters exclude the possibility that Evagrius means that the Christ is
the incarnate Word of God. In this, see also Skemmata 1.[1]

Adam is ‘the figure’ of Christ (Rom. 5, 14), and that of the reasonable nature is Eve, on
account of whom the Christ has departed from his Paradise (V, 1). The Paradise is the gnosis
of the Unity from which the Christ has departed in order to become an angel to angels and a
man to men for the sake of their salvation. This is the Evagrian version of the kenosis of the
Christ in his multi-stage incarnation.

This kenosis is the basis of the following chapter: There is only one of these who has acquired
common names with the others (II, 24). What is meant is that through incarnation into all
the various ranks of minds (noes) after the First Judgement,[2] the Christ is all things to all
minds (noes) in all the worlds created after the Movement, and the only mind (nous) that is
so.[3]

There was a time when the Christ did not have a body; but, in this, there is not a time when
the Word of God was not in him. It is with his genesis, indeed, that the Word of God also has
resided in him (VI, 18). We can see in this passage that the Evagrian doctrine of the relation
of the Christ to the Word of God is that that the Word of God has ‘resided in him’ from his
genesis. This again is not consistent with the Christ’s being the incarnate Word of God, but it
is consistent with the Christ’s being a mind (nous) in which the Word of God has resided,
perhaps in a special way, from that mind’s genesis. And we have already seen that all the
minds (noes) were created in a single act of God.

This passage seems to conflict with KG IV, 18, quoted above: it says that there was not a time
when the Word of God was not in the Christ, while KG IV, 18 asserts that Christ was not the
Word in the beginning. The conflict is resolved if we consider that, yes, the Word of God was
in the Christ from his genesis as a mind (nous), but, no, the Christ never actually was the
Word of God in the beginning: he only contained the Word of God in himself. The question
we ourselves have is this: Did all the minds (noes) have the Word of God in them from their
genesis in the same fashion as the Christ, or was the mind (nous) that was to become the
Christ in some way distinguished from the other minds (noes)? As we have already
remarked, Peri Archon seems to teach the second doctrine.
Alone of all the bodies, the Christ is adorable for us, because he alone has the Word of God in
him (V, 48). This seems clear enough. As we have said, for Evagrius, the Word of God is the
essential gnosis of the Unity.

The body of Christ is connatural with our body, and his soul is of the same nature as our
souls; but the Word which essentially is in him is coessential with the Father (VI, 79). This
seems clear enough. As we have seen, however, the presence of the Word ‘essentially’ in the
Christ cannot be taken to mean that the Christ is the Word of God in the beginning. [4] It is
quite possible that these passages reflect difficulties in the transmission of Evagrius thought
either in the manuscript tradition or in the complex chain of translations, or else that these
passages reflect an inconsistency in Evagrius’ own thought. For they seem to us inconsistent.
Note that the body of Christ referred to in this chapter cannot be his spiritual (resurrection)
body since that is not of the same nature as our ordinary human body; this chapter must
refer to the condition of the Christ before his resurrection.

The anointing either indicates the gnosis of the Unity or designates the contemplation of
beings. And if more than the others Christ is anointed, it is evident that he is anointed with
the gnosis of the Unity. On account of that, he alone is said ‘to be seated at the right’ (Mark
16, 19) of his Father, the right which here, according to the rule of the gnostics, indicates the
Monad and the Unity (IV, 21). He who alone is seated ‘at the right’ (Mark 16, 19) of the
Father, alone has the gnosis of the right of the Father (II, 89). These passages seem clear
enough. The only thing to note is that the anointing is either the gnosis of the Unity or the
contemplation of beings (natural contemplation). However, the Christ is above all anointed
with the gnosis of the Unity, to be identified with the Word of God.

[2] To receive a ‘common name’ is to receive the same nature—here to be understood in the sense of the Christ’s
incarnation into each and every world and type of body. Hence the Christ has incarnated into all the ranks of angels and
so on.

[3] It appears that only in the Second Coming will the Christ incarnate into the demonic worlds in order to save the
demons.

Chapter III -- 11
God, when he created the logikoi, was not in anything; but when he created the corporeal
nature and the worlds which proceeded from it, he was in his Christ (IV, 58). This is an
important doctrine in Evagrius: God himself, without the Christ, in a single act creates all the
minds (noes). Among the minds (noes) is the Christ, in whom is the Word of God from the
beginning, perhaps in a special way. The Movement occurs, and only the Christ is free of
negligence. To him God gives the judgement of the other minds (noes), and the creation both
of the bodies for the minds (noes) judged and of the worlds which correspond to those
bodies. This creation the Christ accomplishes using the second natural contemplation, which
corresponds to the wisdom of God. This is the significance of the following passage: The
gnosis which concerns the second nature is the spiritual contemplation of which the Christ
made use in creating from it the nature of bodies and the worlds (III, 26). As we have already
remarked, the use of a gnosis or contemplation by the Evagrian Christ for the creation of the
bodies and the worlds for the judged minds (noes) indicates both that for Evagrius gnosis or
contemplation is not merely a subjective state of the mind (nous) which knows or
contemplates, and that Evagrius seems to have a Stoic or Neoplatonic doctrine of the role in
creation of the reasons (logoi) of created beings.

It is well to remark that this doctrine of the reasons (logoi) of created things was not in itself
condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. In itself, taken in an Orthodox way—that these
are the reasons (logoi) of created objects in the Mind or wisdom of God—it does not seem to
be heretical. Indeed, St Augustine himself, as we shall see in Chapter IV, advances a similar
doctrine; and St Maximos the Confessor himself espouses a doctrine of natural
contemplation that clearly is based on Evagrius.

Anathema 6 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod does condemn a doctrine that the world was
created by the Christ from ‘subsistent elements more ancient than its [i.e. the world’s] own
existence, the dry, the wet, the hot and the cold, and the form according to which it [i.e. the
world] was modelled’. We have not seen a doctrine of pre-existent elements either in the
Kephalaia Gnostica or in Peri Archon—insofar as we could grasp that aspect of Peri Archon
—but it is possible that that doctrine and the doctrine of the pre-existent form on which the
world was modelled, together reflect an elaboration of Evagrius’ doctrine that the Christ
created the world by means of the second natural contemplation, the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of existent things: it is possible that the ‘form according to which it [i.e. the
world] was modelled’ refers to the reasons (logoi) of created things that are the content of
the second natural contemplation. (Origen himself does not to our knowledge advance such a
detailed doctrine how the Christ created the world.) The statement quoted above from
Anathema 6 would then be the Fifth Ecumenical Synod’s understanding of the Evagrian
doctrine of the use by the Christ of the second natural contemplation to create the worlds.
Would this make the second natural contemplation heretical? We ourselves think that the
notions that the reasons (logoi) of created things are the reasons (logoi) in the Mind or
wisdom of God of those created things and that those reasons (logoi) can be contemplated
(with the grace of God, surely) cannot in themselves be heretical, but should we be proved
wrong, then we submit to the judgement of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

Chapter III -- 12

We now begin to examine further aspects of Evagrius’ soteriology:

He who has placed ‘the most varied wisdom’ (Eph. 3, 10) in the beings is he also who teaches
to those who wish, the art of becoming easily a seer of this wisdom (IV, 7). This is the Christ
first in his role as creator. He also, as saviour, teaches ‘to those who wish, the art of becoming
a seer of this wisdom.’ In the Evagrian system, this is the beginning of natural
contemplation, the second stage of the mystical ascent[1] and an important stage in the
return to the contemplation of the Unity which all will have in the Restoration. Hence, this is
the mercy of Christ made manifest, his providence made manifest, since he is pushing by his
providence, all minds (noes), not just those of men, to return to the Unity by teaching them
to enter into the second natural contemplation.

Christ has appeared creator by the multiplication of the loaves (Matt. 14, 15–21; etc.), by the
wine of the marriage feast at Cana (John 2, 1–10), and by the eyes of him who was born blind
(John 9, 1–7). (IV, 57). This should be clear; it is merely a reiteration of the role of the Christ
as creator, this time as seen in reference to the historical Christ of the New Testament.

We now begin to enter into some of the more complex aspects of the Evagrian soteriology:

Christ, before his coming, has shown to men an angelic body; and to those men it is not the
body that he has now that he has shown, but he has revealed that which they must have (IV,
41). The Christ first ‘incarnated’ from the condition of being a naked mind (nous) united to
the Word of God or the gnosis of the Unity into an angelic body in the world of angels—recall
that since he himself was not guilty of negligence in the Movement, he was not constrained
in the judgement, which he himself executed, to adopt a body and a world. We will discuss
just below what is meant by the second part of this chapter.

Is it that Gabriel has announced to Mary the going out of the Christ from the Father, or his
coming from the world of angels to the world of men? Search also on the subject of the
disciples who have lived with him in his corporeity, if they have come with him from the
world which is seen by us or from another world or from other worlds, and if it is some of
them, or else all. Moreover, search again if it is from the soul state that they had that they
happened to become disciples of Christ (VI, 77). This is an important passage, especially for
Evagrius’ anthropology, but we shall here concern ourselves only with its Christological
aspects, returning to its anthropological aspects in Section 6. Evagrius poses a rhetorical
question. This seems to be his way of introducing ideas which are quite dangerous to state
openly. We do not think that he expects a negative answer; otherwise why would he bother to
pose the question in so formal a work as the Kephalaia Gnostica? We think that what
Evagrius wants to say in an oblique way is that the Annunciation to Mary of the birth of the
Christ does not announce the incarnation of the Word of God, consubstantial with the
Father, into human flesh—the Orthodox doctrine—but the descent of the mind (nous) which
is the Christ and which has already ‘incarnated’ into an angelic body in the world of angels,
from the world of angels to the world of men by means of its incarnation into a human body.
This doctrine was condemned in extenso by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 7.

The ‘feet’ of Christ are praktike and contemplation, and ‘if he places under his feet all his
enemies’ (1 Cor. 15, 25), then all will know praktike and contemplation (VI, 15). The
significance of this passage is that the two main stages of Evagrian ascesis—the practical life
(praktike) and contemplation—are considered to be the ‘feet’ of Christ, and that even the
demons will come to know the practical life and contemplation, that is, make the mystical
ascent to the gnosis of the Unity. This is the Evagrian doctrine of the ‘salvation’ of all minds
(noes) by means of the Christ. Since this includes the minds (noes) which have become men
on this earth, it is a soteriological doctrine. We can see that in the Evagrian system, man’s
salvation consists in the practical life (praktike) and contemplation.
Let us remark here on the characteristic evolution of Origenism from Peri Archon to the
Kephalaia Gnostica: as Rufinus presents him, Origen also refers to ‘all being placed under
the feet of Christ’ as meaning the ultimate salvation of all, but without a doctrine that the feet
of Christ are praktike and contemplation: that seems to be Evagrius’ own elaboration of
Origen, based on concepts of praktike and contemplation taken from Clement of Alexandria.
However, as we shall see, Origen himself has at least a rudimentary outline of the ascent
after death through natural contemplation to the contemplation of the Holy Trinity, and it
seems to be partly on this foundation that Evagrius has articulated his own doctrine of the
contemplative ascent: in Evagrius we see Origen’s somewhat tentative ideas elaborated and
developed into an articulated ascetical and contemplative system.

Just as the Word makes known the nature of the Father, so the reasonable nature makes
known that of Christ (II, 22). That which is knowable of the Christ is in those who are second
by their genesis and that which is not knowable of him is in his Father (IV, 3). The first
chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica here presented depends on the fact that the reasonable
nature and the Christ are all minds (noes) created in a single act of God, so that the
reasonable nature[2] can make known the nature of the Christ. That the Word makes known
the nature of the Father, is, of course, scriptural, referring as it does to the opening chapter
of the Gospel of John. We have already seen, however, that the Word of God is identified by
Evagrius with the gnosis of the Unity or Father.

The contrast here between the Word of God that makes known the nature of the Father and
the reasonable nature that makes known the nature of the Christ strengthens our
interpretation of Evagrius that the Christ is a created mind (nous) and not the Word of God
incarnate.

The second chapter refers to the wisdom that the Christ used in making the worlds. That
wisdom is knowable in the second natural contemplation, and it is what is knowable of the
Christ. We have already in a more general fashion seen this doctrine of the second natural
contemplation as giving to us what is knowable of God. Here, it must be recalled that
according to Evagrius, God in his Christ creates the bodies and worlds, God himself before
the Movement and without the Christ creating only the minds (noes).
It is possible that in this passage Evagrius means ‘the minds (noes)’ by ‘those who are second
by their genesis’, in which case the passage would mean that, just as we saw in the preceding
chapter, being of the same nature as the Christ, the reasonable nature makes known the
created mind (nous) that is the Christ. The reasonable nature makes known the Christ by
means of the first natural contemplation. We will see this later. This would be a more
straightforward interpretation.

What is not knowable of the Christ is his gnosis of the Unity, the Father, and that is what is
in his Father. But we have already seen Evagrius say that the other minds (noes) can attain to
this gnosis by becoming coheirs with the Christ.

[1] The first stage is praktike, the practical life. See Volume II.

[2] Here to be understood as the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the reasonable beings

Chapter III -- 13

We now begin to address the question of Christ’s spiritual body, the one that, according to
Evagrius, he had after his resurrection:

Moses and Elijah are not the Kingdom of God, if the latter is contemplation and the former
are saints. Why, then, did our Saviour, after having promised to the disciples to show them
the Kingdom of God, show them with a spiritual body himself, Moses and Elijah on the
mountain? (Cf. Luke 9, 27–36; etc.) (IV, 23.) We are not sure of the answer to Evagrius’
question. The significance of this for us here is the notion of Christ’s spiritual body. This very
important doctrine of Evagrius, condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 10,
was taken from Origen. In Peri Archon, the spiritual body seems to be a spherical,
etherealized body not based on the actual physical body of man.

The ‘first-born from among the dead’ (cf. Col. 1, 18; Rev. 1, 5) is he who has been resurrected
from among the dead, and he has assumed a spiritual body (IV, 24). This is a clear statement
of the doctrine of the spiritual body that, according to Evagrius, the Christ assumed in the
resurrection.

It is not the Word of God from the beginning which has descended to Sheol and is ascended
to Heaven, but the Christ, who has the Word in him; indeed, the gross body is not susceptible
of gnosis, and God is known (IV, 80). This passage appears to contain the answer to the
question that we could not answer in the chapter just above: to know God, one must be
separated from the gross body—by ascesis, not by suicide; Evagrius is quite emphatic on that
point—and then ascend by contemplation to the gnosis of the Unity. Hence, for Evagrius, in
the Transfiguration of Christ on Tabor, Christ showed his spiritual body to the disciples so as
to bring them by contemplation to the gnosis of the Unity. For in Evagrius the Kingdom of
God is the gnosis or contemplation of the Holy Trinity, or, equivalently, the gnosis or
contemplation of the Unity. As for the reference to the Word of God, we have already seen
Evagrius’ doctrine of the relation of the Word of God to the Christ. Here, the difference
between the Word of God and the Christ is explicit. This chapter was condemned by the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 9.

Chapter III -- 14

If ‘on the third day’ the Christ ‘is completed’ (Luke 13, 32), and if on the preceding day, a
Sabbath, when work was forbidden, he who collected wood in the desert was burned (cf.
Num. 15, 32–6), it is evident that today is that which is called Friday, when ‘at the eleventh
hour’, the nations have been called by our Saviour to eternal life (Matt. 20, 6–7). (IV, 26.)
This is a symbolic interpretation of the three-day passion of our Lord. The significance is that
after we die, we will be placed by a judgement in another world, where we will again be faced
with the choice to ascend towards God or to descend towards the demons. ‘The nations’ are
all the orders of the minds (noes) in all the various worlds, including those into which we
might pass after death. It is not merely a matter of all the nations of men. The implication of
this chapter is that in the next Age (the next day, Saturday) the wicked will be punished by
fire, but on the third day all will be resurrected with the Christ and then will follow the
Restoration. As we have already remarked, there is a structural problem in this system, in the
attempt by Origen, and, following him, Evagrius, to combine the notion of reincarnation with
the notions of the General Resurrection and the Restoration of All Things, with the result
that it is difficult to comprehend how the different aspects of the system articulate the one
with the other. For before the General Resurrection, there will be many incarnations.

Just as, if the earth were destroyed, the night would no more exist on the face of the
firmament, so when vice will be taken up, ignorance will no more exist with the reasonable
beings. Ignorance is the shadow of evil, where those who walk in it as in the night are
illumined by the oil of Christ and see the stars, according to the gnosis which they are worthy
to receive from him, and, they also, ‘The stars will fall’ (cf. Rev. 6, 13) for them, if they do not
return promptly towards the ‘Sun of Justice’ (Mal. 3, 20) (IV, 29). This is a foreshadowing of
Christ’s role as saviour in the return of all the minds (noes) in all the worlds to the gnosis of
the Unity in the Restoration. It is also an allusion to the Evagrian doctrine, taken from
Origen, that the stars are intelligences; we will discuss that under the topic of the Evagrian
angelology. However, to ‘see the stars’ means ‘to contemplate in first natural contemplation
the intelligences which are the stars’. The ‘Sun of Justice’ is of course the Christ.

The Life vivifies first the living, then those who live and those who are dead; but at the end it
will vivify also the dead (V, 20). This is not simply an Orthodox doctrine of the General
Resurrection. It must be understood in the context of the Evagrian doctrine of the
Restoration of All Things: at the Restoration, all minds (noes), including those whom we now
call demons, will return to the gnosis of the Unity. Here, moreover, the General Resurrection
is combined with reincarnation; that is how we understand the intermediate condition of
‘those who live and those who are dead’. These concepts articulate the one with the other
with difficulty.

If vision is said to be in sense-perception and to be in thought, and if the Christ should come
in the same fashion that the disciples have seen him ascend to Heaven (cf. Acts 1, 11), may
one say how they have seen him. May one know, however, that it is in every time that the
Christ ascends truly in the saints, even though he is considered to descend towards others
(VI, 56). This is again a doctrine of the spiritual body of Christ, this time considered in
reference to the Ascension. Moreover, the passage implies that the disciples saw the Christ
ascend to Heaven with his spiritual body ‘in thought’, that is, with a spiritual sense and not
with the bodily eyes. The significance of the second part of this chapter is that the Christ is at
all times all things to all minds (noes) in all worlds.
Christ will come before the judgement to judge the living and the dead, and he will be known
after the judgement, if ‘The Lord is known by the judgement which he makes.’ (VI, 74.) This
seems to assert that the true nature of the Christ will be made manifest in actual practice of
the Last Judgement. Moreover, after the General Resurrection, all the minds (noes), having
been granted dispassion (apatheia) and the spiritual body as a tool for gnosis,[1] will come to
know the Christ in an ascent of gnosis. The first clause seems to refer to the intermediate
judgements which precede each of the incarnations until the Last Judgement.

The retribution which the reasonable nature will receive before the tribunal of Christ is the
spiritual or dark bodies and the contemplation or ignorance appropriate to these; and, on
account of that, it is said that the Christ, whom we await, will come for the ones like this
(with a spiritual body) and the others like that (with a dark, demonic body) (VI, 57). Here, we
see that in the judgement to come, each mind (nous) will receive a body and a degree of
gnosis or contemplation according to what it has done since the previous judgement in the
body that it had. We ourselves understand Evagrius to be saying in the Kephalaia Gnostica
that this judgement occurs for men when they die: they are placed in another world with an
appropriate body according to their works in this world. We understand that this judgement
is repeated innumerable times until the General Resurrection, when all are granted
dispassion (apatheia), receive a spiritual body and commence an upward ascent of gnosis.
We admit to being uncertain whether Evagrius has in mind a common doctrine of
reincarnation, such as is found among Buddhists, wherein men are reincarnated into this
world or perhaps into superior (angelic or soul) worlds or inferior (demonic) worlds; or
whether he means that after their death in this world, men go to another world, either
superior or inferior, but do not return to this world. Origen himself in Peri Archon posits
reincarnation into a succession of single physical worlds which go on into the distant future,
when will occur the Restoration. We will discuss this further under the topic of eschatology.
However, a very important passage is the final clause: when the Christ comes in the Second
Coming, he will come with a body appropriate to each world and to each body: for men he
will come as a man; for angels he will come as an angel; for demons he will come as a demon.

There is still a further problem raised by this chapter: it might be thought that this chapter is
referring only to the Last Judgement, and that the bodies received are the final bodies that
the minds (noes) will then have. But we know from other chapters that after the Last
Judgement, then the minds (noes) will all ascend in gnosis by means of the spiritual body to
the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration; this seems to exclude the possibility that a
demon will forever have a dark body. We again see the problem of the articulation of the
various aspects of this system.

If ‘all the nations come and prostrate themselves before the Lord’, (cf. Ps. 86, 7) it is evident
that even the nations that wish war will come. And if that is so, all the reasonable beings will
prostrate themselves before the name of the Lord, the Christ, who makes known the Father
who is in him. That is, indeed, ‘the name which is above all names’ (Phil. 2, 9) (VI, 27). This
is a repetition of the Evagrian, and Origenist, doctrine of the ultimate salvation of all minds
(noes), including the demons. ‘The name which is above all names’ is the gnosis of the
Father, the Unity, which the Christ has in him.

Who will recount the grace of God? Who will search closely into the reasons (logoi) of
providence, and how the Christ conducts the reasonable nature by means of the diverse
worlds towards the union with the Holy Unity? (IV, 89.) This is a statement of the
providence of God manifest in the Christ. Moreover, it is a statement that that providence
works through the system of successive judgements and reincarnations into the various
worlds, whereby the mind (nous) that finds itself in a world can always turn to make the
upward mystical ascent to the gnosis of the Unity or else turn to make the downward descent
of vice and ignorance towards the demons. The Christ by his providence assists and prods
every mind (nous) in every world to turn to make the upward ascent.

When the Christ will no longer be imprinted in the various worlds and in names of every
sort, ‘then he also will be submitted’ (1 Cor. 15, 28) to God the Father and will delight in the
gnosis of him alone, who is not divided in the worlds and in the increases of the reasonable
beings. (VI, 33.) Just as our Saviour has been ‘the first-born from among the dead’ (cf. Col. 1,
18; Rev. 1, 5), so in the world to come, he will be ‘the first-born of many brothers’ (Rom. 8,
29). (VI, 89.) The first part of the first chapter is a clear statement that the Christ is all things
to all minds (noes) at all times in all worlds: this is the significance of the word ‘imprinted’:
in some fashion, the Christ is present in every world to every mind (nous) found in that
world, so that, through the providence of God exercised in the Christ, every mind (nous) in
that world might turn to ascend towards the gnosis of the Unity. The notion of the Christ’s
being ‘imprinted’ in all the worlds is connected to the Evagrian notion of the imprinting on
the mind (nous) of a mental representation (noema) related to an intelligible reality; we will
discuss this concept in Volume II. However, the Father himself ‘is not divided in the worlds
and in the increases of the reasonable beings’ the way the Christ is: he has committed this
work to the Christ and is himself found only in the gnosis of the Unity. This is to be
understood in the light of the Evagrian and Origenist doctrine that the Father works through
intermediaries.

The second part of the first chapter is an important statement that in the Restoration, the
Christ will be submitted to the Father and will delight in the gnosis of him alone. The second
chapter shows that, for Evagrius, in the Restoration the Christ will be submitted to the
Father as the first-born among many brethren (the whole ensemble of minds (noes) that ever
were created). These statements depend, of course, on the identity of the Christ as one mind
(nous) among the many. These two chapters manifest clearly the heterodox nature of
Evagrius’ Christology, and also, perhaps, the heterodox nature of his Trinitarian theology.

Chapter III -- 15

4 The Evagrian Cosmology

We begin with the more philosophical parts of Evagrius’ cosmology, which for the most part
we present without comment, as being of scholarly interest only.

Everything which has been engendered, either is susceptible of an opposition or is

constituted of an opposition. But it is not all that is susceptible of an opposition that is also
joined with those things that are constituted of an opposition (I, 4).

The principles do not engender and are not engendered, but the mediateness engenders and
is engendered (I, 5).

The next two chapters, however, we think are important; we have already discussed them:[1]

Only fire is distinct of the four elements, by reason of that which in it is living (I, 30). One
part of the fire is capable of burning and the other incapable of burning; capable of burning
is that which burns the sensible matter, and incapable of burning that which is capable of
consuming the trouble of those who are troubled. And the first does not burn the whole
sensible mass, but the second is capable of burning the whole mass of trouble (III, 39).

The vehicle of gnosis is fire and air; but the vehicle of ignorance, air and water (II, 51). For
us, the significance of this passage lies in the relation between gnosis and fire.

Gnosis is not an attribute of bodies; nor are colours attributes of incorporeals; but gnosis is
an attribute of incorporeals and colour an accidental attribute of bodies (IV, 84). This is an
important statement in Evagrius’ philosophy for it distinguishes between certain aspects of
the intelligible order of creation and certain aspects of the sensible order of creation. Gnosis
is an attribute of the reasonable nature. This means that only the reasonable nature—the
minds (noes)—can attain to gnosis or participate in contemplation. Sensible bodies cannot.
Conversely, colour is an attribute that pertains only to the sensible order of creation, and not
to the intelligible order. Only sensible bodies of whatever kind, material bodies in general,
can have colour. Intelligible bodies—minds (noes)—cannot.

The gnosis which concerns the reasonable nature, the minds (noes), is more ancient than
duality, and the knowing nature more ancient than all the natures (II, 19). This gnosis is the
gnosis that pertains to the minds (noes)—that is, first natural contemplation, in particular
the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the minds (noes). This gnosis is prior to duality.
We are not sure what that means. It seems to mean that before the Movement the minds
(noes) did not exist vis à vis God in a state of duality. This is an unusual doctrine, and we
originally thought the absence of duality implied that the gnosis being referred to was not
first natural contemplation but Theology, the essential gnosis that in the Evagrian system is
both the knowledge of and the substance of the Holy Trinity. The sense of the chapter might
very well be, however, that since God used the first natural contemplation to create all the
minds (noes) in his very first act of creation, then that contemplation—that gnosis—existed
before all created natures. The statement that the knowing nature is more ancient than all
the natures seems to reflect the doctrine that the minds (noes) had their genesis prior to the
Movement, whereas all bodies and all worlds were created after the Movement. Conceivably,
the term ‘knowing nature’ might refer to God himself.

The gnosis of the first nature is the spiritual contemplation of which the Creator made use in
making only the minds (noes) which are susceptible of his nature (III, 24). We understand
this passage to be parallel to the previous passage, with the interpretation we there
somewhat hesitantly gave. Here, the interpretation that the gnosis being referred to is first
natural contemplation is certain. What Evagrius is here adding over the previous chapter is
the notion that from this contemplation only minds (noes) capable of knowing God could
have been created. Recall that God himself created the minds (noes) in a single act prior to
the Movement; after the Movement, he gave all judgement and creation into the hands of his
Christ. Here we see that God himself uses a certain contemplation, the first natural
contemplation, to create those minds (noes).

The next chapter elaborates on the notion of the contemplations used in creation:

The first contemplation of nature has sufficed for the genesis of the reasonable nature, and
the second suffices also for its conversion (II, 13). The first contemplation of nature is the
first natural contemplation, the contemplation of angels—in a broader and more elevated
form, the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the minds (noes). It has sufficed, in a way
that Evagrius never explains, for the creation of the minds (noes). The second natural
contemplation suffices for the creation of the bodies and worlds after the Movement. The
first contemplation was used by God himself to create the minds (noes); the second natural
contemplation, by God in his Christ to create the bodies and worlds. That the second natural
contemplation should suffice for the conversion of the reasonable nature seems to be based
the spiritual transformation accomplished in those who participate in that contemplation.[2]

The importance in the Evagrian cosmology of the three contemplations or gnoses—the

essential gnosis which is the substance of the Trinity, the first natural contemplation of the
reasonable beings and the second natural contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of created
objects—can be seen in Skemmata 1, where they are used to provide a fundamental
characterization of the Evagrian Christ:

1 The Christ, in that he is the Christ, has the gnosis which is essential; in that he
is the Creator, the reasons (logoi) of the Ages; in that he is bodiless, the reasons
(logoi) of the bodiless [powers].[3]
Evagrius evidently conceptualizes the use of a contemplation to create something in the
following way: The substance of God is ‘essential gnosis’; hence, gnosis, while it does have
the characteristics that we ordinarily associate with intuitive knowledge, has other attributes
also that make it a far stronger thing than a mere disposition of the knowing mind (nous),
that make it something like the very fabric of reality or the universe. Therefore, in the
unfolding of the fabric of reality in creation, gnosis plays an ontological role in giving both
form and substance to the reality unfolded, be it the noetic world (first natural
contemplation) or the material world (second natural contemplation). However, the agent in
the unfolding, whether it be God himself in first natural contemplation or the Christ in
second natural contemplation, has a basic relation both to the reality to be unfolded and to
the gnosis that is the instrument of the unfolding, of a knower to the gnosis known (with the
proviso that the very substance of God is gnosis, so that God knows in a different way from
created minds (noes)). Thus, the gnostic reasons (logoi) of the material world and the gnostic
reasons (logoi) of the reasonable beings are seen to be the essences of the reality unfolded
not by an Aristotelian process of abstraction from the reality unfolded but because reality
itself has a gnostic character. By this we mean that that reality itself, its very fabric, is gnostic
in nature. We live in a universe woven from gnosis. Or, we live in a universe whose ultimate
fabric has a fundamental relation to the human mind (nous) of gnosis. This doctrine would
be a sort of idealism or mentalism. And this despite Evagrius’ strictures that the material
universe does not have the possibility of gnosis since it does not possess mind (nous); that
gnosis cannot be predicated of material objects, only of minds (noes); and so on. It is in this
context that the Holy Trinity is ‘essential gnosis’.

Among the beings, some have been produced before the judgement and the others after the
judgement. And no one has given information concerning the first genesis, but with regard to
the second genesis, he who has been on Horeb, Moses, has made a narrative in Genesis (II,
64). We have already seen what the first sentence of this chapter means: the minds (noes)
were all created by God before the Movement; after the Movement, God gave to the Christ
the judgement of all the minds (noes) according to their degree of negligence in the
Movement; and in that judgement, the Christ created appropriate bodies and worlds for each
of those minds (noes). The significance of the second sentence is that Scripture has reported
on the second creation, the one we know from the opening chapters of Genesis, that of bodies
and worlds, but is silent on the first creation, that of the minds (noes). In this regard it is
worth recalling from Chapter II, above, that both St Basil the Great and St Augustine of
Hippo accept a separate creation of the angelic natures, the first stating in the Hexaemeron
that ‘the Heavens’ in the first line of Genesis refers to this spiritual creation, the second
stating in the Confessions that Scripture is silent on that spiritual creation. Hence, in our
view, the idea of a separate spiritual creation of the angels is not in itself heretical. However,
the content of that first spiritual creation in the Kephalaia Gnostica, where it includes all the
minds (noes) that ever were created including those of men, certainly is heretical.[4]

Just as he who by his Word has given us a revelation concerning the things of the world to
come has not given us an account concerning the genesis of bodies and of the bodiless
powers, so also he who has taught concerning the genesis of this world has not made known
the passage of the bodies and the bodiless powers but he explains their division and
transformation (II, 73). The first part of this passage indicates that divine revelation—we
here take ‘Word’ to refer to the ‘word of God’ in Scripture, not to the Second Person of the
Holy Trinity—has not spoken of the genesis in the First Judgement after the Movement of
the bodies and the bodiless powers—we here take ‘bodies’ to be all the bodies and all the
worlds appropriate to them, and the bodiless powers to be the angels, the minds (noes)
which after the Movement were given angelic bodies and placed in angelic worlds by the
Christ. The second part of the passage refers, we think, to the account of creation by Moses in
Genesis, which, in fact, is silent on the passage of bodies and the bodiless powers, evidently
from world to world by reincarnation. According to Evagrius, however, Moses explains the
genesis of this world and the division and transformation of the bodies and bodiless powers.
One would need to know much more of the Evagrian system than is easily to be found in the
Kephalaia Gnostica to understand precisely what is meant by this chapter. One possible help
is Gnostic 48:

48 The great and gnostic teacher Didymus said: Ever exercise the reasons
(logoi) concerning providence and the judgement when you are by yourself and
try to carry about the materials of these by means of the memory, for almost all
stumble on these things. And you will find the reasons (logoi) concerning
judgement in the difference of bodies and worlds, the reasons (logoi) concerning
providence, however, in the ways which lead us from vice and ignorance back to
virtue and gnosis.[5]
We can see in this passage that the reasons (logoi) of the judgement by the Christ are to be
found in the differences of bodies and worlds, since each judgement of a mind (nous) leads
to the awarding to that mind (nous) of a body and a world according to its negligence and
since different judgements necessarily lead to different bodies and different worlds. This is
the division of bodies and bodiless powers to which the chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica
under consideration refers. Moreover, the reasons (logoi) concerning the providence of the
Christ are to be found in the pushes that the Christ gives to each mind (nous) to turn it to the
upward ascent to God: the upward ascent is accomplished by the transformations of bodies
and bodiless powers to which the chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica under consideration
refers. Hence, the division of bodies that Moses is said to report on in Genesis is the
judgement that God executes in his Christ, while the transformation of bodies and bodiless
powers that he is said to report on is the mystical ascent under the impulsion of the divine
providence that God also has given into the hands of his Christ. It is not clear to us exactly
where Moses explains these things in Genesis. Most likely, allegorical interpretation is
required. It is also not clear to us what the difference is between the ‘passage’ and the
‘transformation’ of bodies and bodiless powers as given in the text.

The genesis of bodies is not made known by the genesis of the reasonable nature; but it
introduces the nature of names, and the composition of the bodies shows the difference in
rank of the minds (noes) (II, 66). This is a restatement of the Evagrian doctrine that the
reasonable nature—the minds (noes)—were created by God before the Movement, whereas
their bodies were created by the Christ after the Movement, in the First Judgement. The
introduction of names has this significance: after the Movement, the minds (noes) have a
ranking based on the degree of negligence that each mind (nous) had in the Movement, a
ranking that they did not have before the Movement when they were all equal. The
significance of the composition of bodies (i.e. from what proportions of the four elements
they are made) is this: the bodies are assigned by the Evagrian Christ to the minds (noes) on
the basis of his judgement of each mind’s (nous’) degree of negligence; the body that a mind
(nous) is given therefore shows the difference in rank between it and the other minds (noes).
This difference in rank is reflected in the difference in name. Recall that for the Ancients a
name is not merely a moniker but reveals the essence of the thing. This chapter states part of
the doctrine that was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 2.
Just as the various orders distinguish the minds (noes) the one from the other after the
assignment of bodies after the Movement, so also the places which are appropriate to the
bodies joined to the minds (noes) (II, 76). In the First Judgement, the Evagrian Christ
assigns to the mind (nous) not only a body but also a world appropriate to that type of body.
Hence, the world that a mind (nous) finds itself in after the judgement is also a
distinguishing mark of its rank.

Those who live in equal bodies are not in the same gnosis but in the same world. And those
who are in the same gnosis are in equality of bodies and in the same world (II, 14). This
chapter is a clarification of the preceding one. Although the type of body and the world
manifest the rank of the mind (nous), that mind (nous) nonetheless may have a different
gnosis, a different spiritual attainment, from another mind (nous) with the same type of
body in the same world. However, Evagrius says, if two minds (noes) have the same gnosis,
they are necessarily in the same type of body and in the same world. Two men or two angels
of the same order may have an equality of types of bodies, but they may (the two men or the
two angels) have different gnoses. However, a man and an angel cannot have the same
gnosis, because that would imply that they had an equality of types of bodies and worlds.
This being said, it seems to us that according to Evagrius, the man who advances on the
mystical path actually does enter into the angelic world spiritually even while in this flesh.[6]
Hence, the deeper meaning of this passage becomes this: when a man attains to angelic
gnosis, he is equal in body and world to an angel, even if he is still in this flesh. However, this
final point is somewhat uncertain.[7]

The equivalent of a body is that which is equal to it in attribute (VI, 78). The equivalent of a
reasonable substance is that which is equal to it in gnosis (VI, 80). The first passage merely
states that two bodies are equal which are equal according to sensible criteria. The second
chapter, however, gives the first its full significance: two minds (noes) are equal only when
they have the same gnosis. The deeper meaning of these chapters is that the mind (nous) is
not a sensible thing and cannot receive predication with sensible attributes. Similarly, the
sensible body is not a knowing thing and cannot receive predication concerning gnosis, for
that pertains only to knowing things, to the minds (noes).

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[1] See Section 1.

[2] See Section 5.

[3] This passage of the Skemmata parallels and explains KG VI, 16.

[4] This chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica is found, in part, in Greek in Question 600 in Barsanuphios, as is, in part,
also KG II, 69, presented below under the topic of the Evagrian eschatology. This constitutes one item of evidence that
the version intégrale (S2), this version of the Kephalaia Gnostica, is in fact the authentic version, since the version
commune (S1) does not at all reflect the quotations in Barsanuphios. One could consult Guillaumont for more such
details, or even the notes to the French translation of the Kephalaia Gnostica in PO 28, 1, which contain references to
the known fragments. In Appendix 2 of Volume II, in footnotes to the related chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica, we
have provided in English translation many of the Greek fragments, including the Greek fragments just referenced.

[7] This chapter will be important in Volume II for an understanding of the Evagrian doctrine of contemplation

Chapter III -- 16

The hearers of the sensible Church are separated the one from the other by places only; but
those of the intelligible Church which is opposed to the former are separated by places and
by bodies (V, 2). This passage seems to be on much the same lines as the chapters just cited.
This the only chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica to refer explicitly to the Church. The
sensible Church is the human Church; the intelligible Church is the ensemble of the ‘saved’
minds (noes), the universal body of Christ in all the worlds: the members of this Church are
separated by worlds and by bodies since they are minds (noes) having various ranks. Recall
that the Evagrian Christ is all things to all minds (noes) in all worlds.
However, Evagrius himself provides this rather unusual definition of ‘Church’ in Scholia on
Ecclesiastes 1:

1 The Church is true gnosis in pure souls of Ages and Worlds and of the
Judgement and Providence which are in those [Ages and Worlds]. The
Ecclesiast, then, is the Christ, the begetter of this very gnosis. Or, the Ecclesiast
is he who by means of ethical contemplations purifies souls and leads them to
natural contemplation.[1]

This scholium seems to say that being a member of the intelligible Church is a matter of true
gnosis, here natural contemplation together with the contemplations of Judgement and
Providence, which can be attained by minds (noes) having different types of bodies in
different sorts of worlds

Chapter III -- 17

We now turn to the composition of the worlds. We have already seen that the worlds are
created by the Evagrian Christ by his judgement after the Movement to correspond to the
bodies that he has granted to the minds (noes) according to their degree of negligence in the
Movement. Moreover, we have already seen that the worlds are created by the Evagrian
Christ by the use of a certain contemplation, the second natural contemplation, as if that
contemplation were a substance, force or power.

The world is the natural composition, or constitution, which comprises the various and
different bodies of the minds (noes), for the sake of the gnosis of God (III, 36). While the
judgement that the Evagrian Christ makes is a judgement, it is ultimately intended to lead
the minds (noes) to the gnosis of God. It is not merely a punishment. Moreover, Evagrius is
discussing the nature of the various worlds, which he further explains in the next chapter:

There is in common this, that all the worlds are constituted from the four elements, but in
distinction this, that each of them has a variation of quality (III, 23). This is an important
assertion by Evagrius of the unity of the whole order of creation. There are only four
elements—curiously, he does not include the Aristotelian ether, and, as we have seen, he has
the unusual doctrine of the living nature of fire[1]—and each world is constituted from these
four elements, the differences among them lying in variations of quality. Evagrius nowhere
explains what he means, but we think that he has in mind the relative proportions of each
element in each of the worlds: just like the bodies, some worlds are more fiery than others,
some more airy and so on. This seems to exclude the notion common in modern occultism
that worlds such as these are astral: composed of a suprasensible matter in a way similar to
the soul in Epicureanism. However, in contrast with Peri Archon, where there is one world
which is a term in a sequence of ‘one worlds’ extending indefinitely into the past and very far
into the future, in Evagrius the worlds seem to coexist simultaneously in an ontological
ensemble.[2] Origen seems to posit reincarnation along the sequence of ‘one worlds’,
whereas Evagrius seems to posit reincarnation among the various member-worlds of the
stably existing ensemble. However Origen and Evagrius agree that there are various ranks
into which one may be incarnated depending on one’s merit, whether good or bad.

Just as the nature of bodies is hidden by the attributes which abide in the bodies and make
them pass from one to another without cease, so the reasonable nature is hidden by virtue
and gnosis, or by vice and ignorance. And to say that one of these second things, vice or
ignorance, might naturally have been made with the minds (noes) is not just, because it is
with the constitution or composition of the nature that it has appeared (II, 18). The first part
of this passage seems to be an Aristotelian account of being and becoming in the material
creation. The second part is an application by analogy of this notion to the reasonable nature,
the minds (noes). We have already seen a brief chapter which states that virtue is conceived
relatively to the contingent nature of the worlds in which the minds (noes) find themselves
with their bodies after the Movement and the First Judgement.[3] Here we see an
application of that notion. The attributes which the reasonable nature can have are virtue
and vice, or gnosis and ignorance. A reasonable nature can change along these dimensions as
it were. However, Evagrius wants to say, this condition of mutability of the minds (noes)
along the dimensions of virtue and vice or gnosis and ignorance is due to their being in
bodies and worlds; it is not something which they had in the beginning, before the
Movement. However, a qualification is in order here: Elsewhere, Evagrius states
emphatically that the seeds of the virtues are from the beginning, and indeed are never lost
from any mind (nous), even a demonic one. Hence what seems to be meant is that
distinctions of vice and virtue, or gnosis and ignorance—these sorts of distinctions—pertain
to the orders in which the minds (noes) find themselves after the Movement. If in the
chapter under discussion ‘second things’ refers only to vice and ignorance, as we have taken
it, then Evagrius also intends the further notion that before the Movement there was no vice
or ignorance since all the minds (noes) were engaged in the contemplation of the Unity. The
‘constitution or composition of the nature’ in the chapter would then refer to the giving of
worlds and bodies after the Movement.

The judgement of God is the creation of the world, to which he gives a body according to the
rank of each of the minds (noes) (III, 38). As much as the judge has judged the justiciable
things, so much has he also made worlds; and he who knows the number of judgements
knows also the number of worlds (II, 75). We have already seen what this means. The only
important thing that is new is the notion that the judgements and worlds are very, very
many. However, let us remark that here Evagrius seems to assert that the world is created
before the body: he seems to be saying that in the judgement a mind (nous) is given a world
and then a body appropriate to that world. Elsewhere he says that the mind (nous) is given a
body and then a world.

‘In the blink of an eye’ (1 Cor. 15, 52), the Cherubim have been called Cherubim; Gabriel,
Gabriel; and man, man (III, 54). This is a statement of the instantaneity both of the First
Judgement after the Movement and of the creation of worlds.

One question we ourselves have, a question that does not seem to be addressed in the
Kephalaia Gnostica, is this: When men became men, were they all born into this world at the
same time? If there is a serial order in the birth of men, in the Evagrian system what
determines when a man is born into this world? We will see when we discuss the Evagrian
anthropology that there is an intermediate soul state of men, men who are souls but who
have not yet been born on earth. Perhaps in the Evagrian system men are held in this soul
state until it is time for them to be born as men? Evagrius himself never fully addresses this
point. Peri Archon indicates that men are minds (noes) that first of all became souls and
then further fell into human bodies. This is, as we shall see in the section on anthropology,
Evagrius’ own doctrine of the soul state.

Who has known the first division and who has seen the genesis of bodies and who has seen
the genesis of these various worlds, from which certain holy powers nourish themselves and
over which they have exercised a blessed royalty? (II, 74.) ‘First division’ refers to the First
Judgement, the one after the Movement. This chapter appears to add the notion that the
angels nourish themselves from the worlds which were created and over which they have a
certain royalty. We will later see that the angels nourish themselves with the second natural
contemplation of things on the earth.

The sensible nations are distinguished the one from the other by the places, by the laws, by
the languages, by the clothing, and sometimes also by the qualities. The intelligible and holy
nations are distinguished by the worlds, by the bodies and, it is said, by the languages also.
The father of the first is Adam, and he of the second, Christ, of whom Adam is ‘the figure’
(Rom. 5, 14) (VI, 3). This a discussion of the orders of angels. The notion that the Christ is
the father of the angels appears to have to do with the fact that he creates the bodies and the
worlds for the angels. The only new thing in this chapter is the notion that different orders of
angels have different languages in addition to different bodies and different worlds.

Each of the orders of the heavenly powers has been constituted either completely from
superiors (angels) or completely from inferiors (demons) or from superiors and inferiors
(angels and demons) (II, 78). This is a statement of the composition of the angelic orders.
We ourselves do not understand how angels and demons can be mixed into the same order,
unless, in Evagrius’ system, it is after the demons have converted and recommenced the
mystical ascent. However, Evagrius nowhere says that explicitly, and this chapter, combined
with KG V, 11, is quoted verbatim by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 5.

The more the worlds increase, the more also the names and mental representations which
are appropriate to them will make us know the Holy Trinity (VI, 67). This has to do with the
Evagrian theory of contemplation, that we come to know the Holy Trinity through its
wisdom expressed in creation, through the contemplation of the wisdom of the Holy Trinity
expressed in the various worlds. The contemplation of the worlds is an advanced stage of
natural contemplation, something that occurs after the ascetic begins to contemplate the
angels.[4] Evagrius is not completely clear on the stages of mystical ascent after the
contemplation of angels up to the contemplation of the Unity; however, it appears that in the
Evagrian system, one begins to approach the contemplation of the Holy Trinity after the
contemplation of angels and their reasons (logoi), by means of the contemplation of the
worlds.[5]
From those who have reached the perfect accomplishment of evil, it is possible for us to
comprehend the multitude of worlds which have been produced; it is not possible, really,
that we should be completed all at once in ignorance, because no more is it possible in gnosis
(II, 65). We take this simply to be a statement of the multiplicity of worlds.

Not one of the worlds has been above the first world; it is said, indeed, that the latter has
been made from the principal quality; and an athlete and gnostic has taught us that in it will
be completed all the worlds (VI, 45). It is not in all the worlds that you will find Egypt; but in
the last worlds you will see Jerusalem and the Mount of Zion (V, 21). Just as those who
inhabit this world receive a very small vision concerning the world to come, so those who are
in the last world see certain luminous rays of the Holy Trinity (V, 3). If ‘the four arms’ (Gen.
2, 10) are divided from one sole ‘river’ (Gen. 2, 10), may one name the world in which there
has been one sole river, so that the body might also comprehend the Paradise from which it
will drink (V, 72). We think that these four chapters are all talking about the same thing: the
first and last world, the one from which the mind (nous) contemplated, as it were, the Unity
before the Movement—we say ‘as it were’ because before the Movement there were no worlds
—and from which, in the mystical ascent, it will anew contemplate the Unity. This is the goal
of the Evagrian ascetic, a goal which is consummated for all minds (noes) in the Restoration.
The relation between this one world and the condition after the Restoration when all minds
(noes) will nakedly contemplate the Holy Trinity after all the worlds have been destroyed
seems to be this: this first and last world relates to the condition of the ascetic just prior to
the contemplation of the Holy Trinity: in the Restoration, there will only be the
contemplation of the Unity, without worlds. The first and last world thus seems to be the
very last stage of natural contemplation before entry into Theology, contemplation of the
Holy Trinity. In the first chapter cited, ‘athlete and gnostic’ appears to refer to Evagrius’
teacher, Didymus the Blind.

Among the animals, it is said that some take their breath from without, some from within,
some from their environment, and some from all sides. And it is said that those who take
their breath from outside are men and all those who have lungs; those who take it from
within, the fishes and all those of whom the gullet is large; those who take it from their
environment, the bees with the spathe of their wings; and those who take it from all sides,
the demons and all the minds (noes) who possess bodies of air (IV, 37). This does not seem
to be very important.
All that is a part of this world pertains to the corporeal nature; and all that which pertains to
the corporeal nature is a part of this world (VI, 50). This passage is important, for it suggests
that the world of men is unique. While Evagrius posits an ontological ensemble of worlds,
only the world of men is corporeal. This would be the point at which his doctrine would
articulate with Origen’s doctrine of the succession of ‘one worlds’.

Two among the worlds purify the passionate part of the soul, the one of them by praktike
and the other by cruel torment (V, 5). The world that purifies the passionate part of the soul
by praktike, the practical life, is the present world of men. The world that purifies by cruel
torment is Hades. There, both men and demons will be purified ‘until they have paid the last
copper’. As Evagrius says elsewhere, this is ‘a minimal suffering’: in Origen’s and Evagrius’
systems, such suffering is not eternal; hence the concept that Hades purifies the passionate
part of the soul.

[2] Evagrius seems to hint, however, that the number of worlds can increase as time goes on. See KG VI, 67, presented
below.

[4] Although we have adopted this interpretation of the ‘contemplation of the worlds or Ages’, it sometimes seems that
Evagrius intends by the term second natural contemplation. However, second natural contemplation is prior to first
natural contemplation and Evagrius often seems to intend by the term a much higher contemplation than second
natural contemplation.

[5] We will discuss this matter further, including the notion of ‘mental representation’, in Volume II, in the Digression
on the Evagrian doctrine of contemplation and in the commentary on Chapters 38–43 of On the Thoughts

Chapter III -- 18

Those who have cultivated their land during the six years of praktike, nourish the orphans
and the widows not in the eighth year, but in the ‘seventh’ (Exod. 23, 10–11); indeed, in the
eighth year, there are no orphans or widows (V, 8). The interpretation of this chapter is
uncertain. This somewhat eschatological passage alludes to the attainment of dispassion
(apatheia) in the General Resurrection (the seventh year). In the Restoration (the eighth
year), however, all the minds (noes) contemplate the Unity as equals absorbed into the
henad. The next chapter is similar:
The Last Judgement will not make known the transformation of bodies but it will make
known their destruction (II, 77). In the General Resurrection, the minds (noes) put off their
gross bodies, receiving spiritual bodies quite similar to the spiritual resurrection body taught
by Evagrius to have been possessed by the Christ after his resurrection, by means of which
spiritual bodies the minds (noes) ascend to the contemplation of the Unity in the
Restoration, when they put off the spiritual body to become naked minds (noes). The
transformation of bodies is what occurs to the minds (noes) in the intermediate judgements
that occur until the General Resurrection. This chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica is quoted
almost verbatim by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 11.

Given this chapter and Anathema 11 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, the Last Judgement
must occur not at the General Resurrection but later, at the Restoration. However, we think
that Evagrius is speaking broadly here: the Last Judgement occurs at the General
Resurrection when all the gross bodies are destroyed in favour of spiritual bodies. Then in
the Restoration even the spiritual bodies are put off.

We now turn to the Restoration:

Just as the destruction of the last world will not be accompanied by a genesis, so the genesis
of the first world is not preceded by a destruction (V, 89). The notion that the first world is
not preceded by a destruction has to do with the Evagrian doctrine of the Movement.[1] The
notion that the destruction of the last world will not be accompanied by a genesis has to do
with the notion that in the Restoration, all the minds (noes) will nakedly contemplate the
Unity.[2] This chapter states part of the doctrine that was condemned by the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 14.

It can fairly be said that the Evagrian cosmology is a very elaborate system based on Origen
that is very difficult to understand in all its detail. It combines certain concepts of
Aristotelian and Stoic or Neoplatonic philosophy with a system of reincarnation and multiple
worlds together with the possibility of migration from one world or body to another for good
or ill; together with the notion of the General Resurrection and the reception then from the
Christ of both dispassion (apatheia) and a spiritual body; together with the doctrine that
after the General Resurrection all the minds (noes) will ascend to the contemplation of the
Unity in the Restoration of All Things, when all the worlds will be destroyed and the minds
(noes) will thenceforth nakedly contemplate God, having put off the spiritual body received
in the General Resurrection.

We now turn to look at a topic which approaches more closely our concern with
anthropology: the nature of the minds (noes). After that topic, we turn directly to the
Evagrian anthropology

Chapter III -- 19

5 The Evagrian Doctrine of the Minds (Noes)

The corporeal or bodily nature and the incorporeal or reasonable nature, the minds (noes),
are both knowable; but the reasonable nature alone is knowing. God, however, is both
knowing and knowable; but it is not as the reasonable nature that he knows, nor, to any
further extent, as the bodily nature or the reasonable nature that he is known (III, 80). Both
the material order and the immaterial or reasonable order of creation are knowable, but only
the reasonable order is capable of knowledge—gnosis. Only that which has mind (nous) is
capable of knowing. God is both knowing and knowable, but he does not know in the same
way that the reasonable created nature knows, nor is he known in the same way that either
the material or the reasonable orders of creation are known. For Evagrius, the key attribute
of mind (nous) is its ability to know. This might be taken to include the notion of
consciousness. Here, he has delineated the differences among the material order of creation,
the reasonable order of creation, and God, regarding the capacity of each order both to know
and to be known.

The corporeal nature has received ‘the most varied wisdom’ (Eph. 3, 10) of Christ, but is not
able to know it. But the incorporeal nature both manifests the wisdom of the Unity, in the
sense of having been formed by the wisdom of God, and is able to know the Unity (III, 11).
The corporeal nature does not have the capacity to know, but it has been formed by the
wisdom of God. The reasonable nature has the capacity to know both the wisdom of God and
the Unity itself, and it has been formed by the wisdom of God.

All the beings have been produced for the gnosis of God. All that which is produced for
another thing is less than that for which it has been produced; for that reason, the gnosis of
God is superior to all (I, 87). ‘Beings’ must here be understood as ‘reasonable beings’ in the
light of the two previous chapters. The second sentence seems to be a bit of a non sequitur,
unless one considers that for Evagrius gnosis evidently has a substantial existence. His sense
seems to be that since all reasonable beings have been produced for the sake of the gnosis of
God, then the gnosis of God, which is the substance of God, is superior to all reasonable
beings.

All the reasonable nature has been naturally made to be and to be knowing, and God is
essential gnosis. The reasonable nature has as an opposition the fact of non-being and gnosis
has as an opposition vice and ignorance; but none of these things is opposed to God (I, 89).
None of these things are opposed to God in the sense of an eternal principle opposed to God.
[1]

From the contemplation of which is constituted the mind (nous), it is not possible that some
other thing might be constituted, unless that also might be capable of knowing the Trinity
(III, 69). We again see the notion that a contemplation is an objectively existing power or
substance, by means of which something is constituted or created. Here, a certain
contemplation is used to constitute the mind (nous). Moreover, that contemplation is of such
a sort that only a being capable of knowing the Holy Trinity—a being that is a mind (nous)—
could be constituted from that contemplation. We have already seen that the contemplation
in question is the first natural contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the reasonable nature
and that it was used by God himself to create all the minds (noes) in a single act prior to the
Movement.

All the reasonable nature is divided into three parts: life reigns over the one, life and death
reign over the second, and only death reigns over the third (IV, 65). These three parts are, of
course: first, the angels; second, men; third, the demons.

Among the reasonable beings having mind (nous), some possess spiritual contemplation and
(spiritual) praktike, others praktike and contemplation, and others shackles and the
judgement (I, 13). This is interesting for its concept, not otherwise addressed in the
Kephalaia Gnostica, of a spiritual praktike of angels. For, in the Evagrian system, praktike is
a characteristic not of angels but of the human soul. Otherwise, the chapter is a repetition of
the thought of the previous chapter: the angels have spiritual contemplation and spiritual
praktike; men have praktike and contemplation; the demons have shackles and the
judgement.

Whether the reasonable beings might always exist or whether they might not always exist is a
matter of the will of the Creator, but whether they might be immortal or mortal depends on
their will, and whether they might be joined or whether they might not be joined to one sort
of body or world or another (I, 63). This has to do with the succession of judgements of the
minds (noes) in each of their lives according to their merit. This applies not only to men but
also to all the orders of angels, demons and unembodied souls. The next chapter explains
this one:

The true life of the reasonable beings is their activity according to nature, and their death is
their activity contrary to nature. But if he who is naturally made to seek the true life of gnosis
of the Unity is capable of such a death, who among the beings is immortal? Every created
reasonable nature, in fact, is susceptible of an opposition (I, 64). This is important for its
definition of the life and death of the reasonable being. Recall that the mind (nous) is
intelligible, and that it is not subject to the laws of the sensible creation, nor subject to
attribution by sensible predicates. Recall also that the mind (nous) is seen along two
dimensions: gnosis or ignorance, and virtue or vice. Here, the true life of the mind (nous) is
defined as its activity according to nature; clearly, Evagrius is implying that gnosis and virtue
are according to nature and ignorance and vice contrary to nature, so that these are the life
and death respectively of the mind (nous). The opposition referred to in the last sentence of
the chapter is precisely the opposition between gnosis and ignorance or virtue and vice.
Evagrius sees good and evil in terms of such oppositions, which are both Platonic and
Aristotelian. The rhetorical question that Evagrius poses has this sense: because of free will
every mind (nous) can choose an activity contrary to nature and therefore die a spiritual
death. It is for this reason that all men, angels, demons and unembodied souls are subject to
successive judgements according to merit. That was the sense of the previous chapter.

Submission is the assent of the will of the reasonable nature, with a view to the gnosis of God
(VI, 68). Submission is the weakness of the reasonable nature which cannot overstep the
limits of its rank; thus, really, ‘He has put all things under his feet’ (1 Cor. 15, 27) according
to the word of Paul (VI, 70). The importance of submission here is its connection to each
mind’s (nous’) freedom. There is also the idea of the reasonable nature’s keeping by an act of
its will to its proper place in the order of creation under the dominion of the Christ.
Elsewhere we have learned that the ‘feet’ of the Christ are praktike and natural
contemplation.[2]

In regard to all that is constituted of the four elements, whether a thing be at a distance or
whether it be near, it is possible for us to receive a likeness of it. But only our mind (nous) is
incomprehensible to us, just as God, its Author is. It is not possible, indeed, for us to
comprehend a nature susceptible of the Holy Trinity, nor to comprehend the Unity,
substantial gnosis (II, 11). The first sentence of the chapter involves the Stoic theory of
perception. It is important because Evagrius consistently uses this model of perception in his
ascetical psychology.[3]

Here, however, Evagrius is asserting that the nature of the mind (nous) is incomprehensible,
just as the nature of God is. We already saw this idea in Chapter I of the present work, when
we looked at the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa and St Macrina. It is interesting that
Evagrius explains this incomprehensibility of the mind (nous) by reference to the mind’s
capacity to know the Holy Trinity: for something to be able to know the Holy Trinity, it must
itself be beyond human comprehension. St Gregory accounted for the incomprehensibility of
the mind (nous) on the basis of its being the image of God, a doctrine that Evagrius states
just below. We here see an aspect of Evagrius’ thought that is close to that of the
Cappadocians; it is well to remember that he comes out of their circle and perforce must
have taken with him to Egypt certain of their doctrines, which he evidently retained in the
midst of his own elaborations.

[3] We will spend much time in Volume II on this theory of perception, for it is extended by Evagrius right up to the
gnosis of God.

Chapter III -- 20

It is not because the mind (nous) is incorporeal that it is the likeness of God, but because it
has been made receptive of him. If it were because it were incorporeal that it were the
likeness of God, it would therefore be essential gnosis and it would not be by receptivity that
it had been made the image of God. But examine if it is the same thing, the fact that it should
be incorporeal and the fact that it is receptive of gnosis, or else otherwise, as in the case of
the subject of a statue and his statue (VI, 73). The reader will recall from Chapter I of this
work the discussion between St Gregory and St Macrina of the immateriality of the mind
(nous) and the connection of that to the mind’s being the image of God. In particular, St
Gregory objected that by making both God and the mind (nous) immaterial, St Macrina was
making them to be of the same substance. Here, in this chapter of Evagrius, we see an echo
of what must have been a topic of discussion among the Cappadocians. Evagrius asserts that
the mind’s (nous’) being the image of God cannot be assigned merely to the mind’s being
immaterial, for that would imply that the mind (nous) were of the same substance as God—
we again see the phrase ‘essential gnosis’ in a context which appears to make of the gnosis of
God the very substance of the Godhead. No, Evagrius says, the image of God resides in the
fact that the mind (nous) is receptive of the gnosis of God. Then Evagrius poses a rhetorical
question. Perhaps, he asks, being immaterial and being receptive of gnosis are the same
thing—or is it otherwise, as in the subject of a statue (God) and the statue (the mind or
nous)? The second part is clearly an allusion to the ‘anthropomorphites’ of the Egyptian
desert of Evagrius’ time. It seems to us that Evagrius expects a positive answer to his
question, which, however, would go against what he has just said. We are not sure what he is
driving at.

The image of God is not that which is susceptible of wisdom, for thus the corporeal nature
would also be the image of God. But it is that which has become susceptible of the Unity that
is the image of God (III, 32). Here ‘susceptible of wisdom’ does not mean ‘capable of knowing
the wisdom of God’ but ‘capable of being formed by the wisdom of God in creation, by means
of the second natural contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of created things’. In the second
sentence, ‘susceptible of the Unity’ means ‘capable of participating in the gnosis of the Unity’.
Hence, Evagrius is asserting that being formed by the wisdom of God is not sufficient to
make a creature be in the image of God: it is the fact that a creature is susceptible of the
gnosis of the Unity that makes it be in the image of God. But to be susceptible of the gnosis of
the Unity is precisely to have mind (nous). Hence, for Evagrius, all the minds (noes) are in
the image of God, whereas the creation that is without mind (nous) is not in the image of
God, even though it is formed by the wisdom of God.

The image of the essence of God also knows the contemplation of things which are, but it is
not absolutely the case that he who knows the contemplation of beings is the image of God
(II, 23). The first clause says that the mind (nous) also knows the second natural
contemplation, the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of existent things. Evagrius then
goes on to say that he who knows the first natural contemplation is not necessarily the image
of God. We do not know to what he might be referring, since we have already seen that all
minds (noes) are susceptible of the gnosis of the Unity and are therefore the image of God,
and we know that in the Evagrian system there are no reasonable beings except the minds
(noes). Of course, if Evagrius means that a mind (nous) which knows the first natural
contemplation may not yet have been perfected in the gnosis of the Unity and therefore may
not yet have returned to the fullness of the image of God, then the passage is quite
comprehensible. Then the first sentence would mean that a mind (nous) which had attained
to the gnosis of the Holy Trinity implicitly also had the second natural contemplation.

All that which is in potentiality in the bodies is in them naturally also in act; they are
connatural with those from which they came forth. But the mind (nous) is free of form and of
matter (I, 46). The first sentence is based on Evagrius’ philosophy of nature. It means that
what a material body has in potentiality in itself can naturally also become act, because every
material body is connatural with the material body from which it was generated. This is not
necessarily biological; it has more to do, it seems to us, with the Aristotelian idea of the
generation of a material body as that body from another material body. However, Evagrius
says, the mind (nous) is not subject to the philosophical laws of the material creation. It has
neither Aristotelian form nor Aristotelian matter, here taken as attributes of the material or
sensible creation. The mind (nous), being intelligible, is free both of form and of matter, and
of the laws of the sensible creation, in particular the Aristotelian laws of the generation and
corruption of material bodies the one from the other.[1]

It is possible to say what the unity of the mind (nous) is; but that which is its nature is
unsayable, for these is no gnosis of the quality of that which has been constituted neither of
form nor of matter. For that reason, there is no gnosis of the quality of the soul (III, 31). We
have already seen that Evagrius has ascribed the incomprehensibility of the mind (nous) to
its capacity to know the Holy Trinity. Here he is deriving its unknowability from its
formlessness and immateriality. When Evagrius says that there is no gnosis of the ‘quality’ of
the soul, he must mean the ‘essence’, for we know from other chapters that the ascetic will
enjoy at a certain stage the gnosis of the bodiless powers, the angels, and of their reasons
(logoi); and we have already seen Evagrius assert that the reasonable nature is knowable. We
wonder if what Evagrius is saying here is completely consistent with his assertion that the
image of God resides in the mind’s being able to know God and not in its immateriality.

The next chapter explains the unity of the mind (nous):

The name of ‘immortality’ makes known the natural unity of the mind (nous), and the fact
that it is eternal makes known its ‘incorruptibility’ (cf. 1 Cor. 15, 53–4). The gnosis of the
Trinity accompanies the first name and the first contemplation of nature accompanies the
second (III, 33). The first contemplation of nature is the contemplation of the angels. When
the mind (nous), which in any event is eternal, has reached the stage of the contemplation of
the bodiless powers, the first natural contemplation, then it has attained to its
incorruptibility and has thus realized its native eternity, without, however, having yet
attained to its immortality and to a realization of its unity. When, however, that mind (nous)
further attains to the stage of the contemplation of the Holy Trinity, then it has attained also
to its immortality, which is also the realization of its natural unity. Given the other chapters
we have seen, immortality seems to differ from eternity in conveying perfection in gnosis and
virtue.

[1] St Thomas Aquinas takes the view that the angels are subject to Aristotelian metaphysics. See Chapter IV.

Chapter III -- 21

All that pertains to the corporeal or material nature and which is called holy is ‘sanctified by
the word of God’ (1 Tim. 4, 5), and all that among the reasonable beings is named holy is
sanctified by the gnosis of God. But in this there are yet those among the reasonable beings
who are sanctified by the word of God, like children, and who are susceptible of gnosis (III,
74). The first sentence is important, for it explains the difference between a holy object—a
chalice, say—and a holy mind (nous). The chalice is sanctified by the word of God. The mind
(nous) of him who holds the chalice is sanctified by the gnosis of God. We are not sure to
whom the second sentence refers if it is not to men, whom Evagrius elsewhere calls children.
Evagrius’ sense in the second sentence is that a certain class of minds (noes) are sanctified
not by gnosis but by the word of God, evidently because of their spiritually childlike nature.
That which is impure becomes so either by the consequence of a use contrary to nature or by
the consequence of vice. And all that which by a use contrary to nature is considered as being
defiled proceeds from the corporeal nature, but that which is defiled because of vice is said to
proceed from the reasonable nature (III, 75). This chapter corresponds to the previous
chapter. Here, Evagrius discusses the impurity of the material object—that impurity arises
from a use contrary to nature—and the impurity of the mind (nous)—that impurity arises
from vice. Vice is an action of the mind (nous) contrary to nature. An inanimate object
cannot be subject to vice precisely because it does not have mind (nous); it can only be
defiled by a use contrary to nature. The reasonable nature, however, is mind (nous) and
subject to vice.

There is not one of the second beings which might be capable of gnosis, nor one of the first
beings which might have been from the beginning in a place (I, 61). This is a repetition of a
basic feature of the Evagrian cosmology. The second beings are the bodies that the first
beings, the minds (noes), received after the Movement; they are also all the objects in all the
worlds that the minds (noes) received with those bodies. The bodies and the worlds are not
capable of gnosis. That is reserved to the minds (noes). However, the minds (noes), which
are the first beings, are immaterial and are not subject to the laws of the sensible creation.
They are therefore not subject to being in a place. We have already seen this assertion on the
part of St Macrina in Chapter I of the present work.

Gnosis is said to be in a place when he who is susceptible of it is bound to one of the second
beings, which truly and principally is said to be in a place (I, 62). This should now be quite
clear. Although the minds (noes) are not subject to being in a place, they have all been given
bodies, and the bodies can be in a place. When the mind (nous) has a certain gnosis, and its
body is somewhere, then that gnosis is said to be in that place.

Just as our body is said to be in a place, so also the mind (nous) is said to be in some one
gnosis; on account of that, gnosis is conventionally said to be the mind’s (nous’) place (V,
70). This chapter is important for what it says about the mind (nous). For it seems to suggest
that on the ‘scale’ of gnosis, each mind (nous) can be positioned somewhere. However we
would not want to exaggerate this; it may be that Evagrius is merely asserting that when a
mind (nous) is in a certain gnosis, then one can say that it is in that gnosis, and that that
gnosis can then be said to be that mind’s (nous’) place.
In the gnosis of those who are second by their genesis, the various worlds are constituted and
unspeakable battles follow in the gnosis’ course. But in the Unity, none of that happens; it is
an unspeakable peace and there is nothing but the naked minds (noes) which always take
their fill of its inexhaustibleness, if, according to the word of our Saviour, ‘The Father judges
no one, but he has given all judgement to the Christ.’ (John 5, 22.) (I, 65.) This is a very
complex passage. Those who are second by their genesis are the bodies and the worlds that
the minds (noes) have received after the Movement. The gnosis of those bodies and worlds
corresponds to second natural contemplation. Evagrius intends the first sentence to be taken
both cosmologically—this contemplation is the power with which the Evagrian Christ created
the material order of creation, and the battles (with the demons) are objective—and as a
matter of ascetical practice or experience—this is what the ascetic experiences in second
natural contemplation. KG III, 41 sheds light on this: In regard to the contemplation of
beings and in regard to the gnosis of the Trinity, the demons and we have raised a great
battle, the ones with the others, the former wishing to prevent us from knowing and we in
applying ourselves to learn (III, 41). To return to the chapter at hand, the next sentence is a
sketch of the gnosis of the Unity. The reference to the Christ derives from the fact that after
the Movement the Father has given all judgement into the hands of the Christ; hence, when
one has attained to the Father, to the Unity, he has surpassed judgement.

We see a parallelism here, quite striking and present throughout the Kephalaia Gnostica,
between the structure of Evagrius’ cosmology and the structure of his mystical psychology:
The minds (noes) come to exist and contemplate the Unity. Then there is the Movement and
the Father gives all judgement and further creation into the hands of the Christ. In the
reverse mystical ascent, however, when the ascetic enters into the contemplation of the
Unity, then he becomes coheir of the Christ, and with him contemplates the Unity beyond
the judgement that it is the duty of the Christ to execute.

The equivalent of a reasonable substance is that which is equal to it in gnosis (VI, 80). This is
a passage we have already seen, a parallel passage to one concerning material bodies, that
the equivalent of a material body is one that is equivalent in sensible quality. From what we
have already seen, this chapter should be clear.

Chapter III -- 22
There is in this one among all the beings who is without name and of which the region is not
known (II, 37). We do not know what this means. There is a passage similar to it in the
Letter to Melania which seems to Parmentier to integrate two chapters of the Kephalaia
Gnostica, II, 37 and III, 70, and to be a reference to the Christ:[1] according to Parmentier,
the Christ is the only naked mind (nous), since in the Movement he was the only mind
(nous) to have remained entirely in the contemplation of the Unity; and he is the one to
whom the present chapter, KG II, 37, refers.[2]

We are not persuaded. First of all, Frankenberg’s Greek retro-translation of the passage of
the Letter does not map so easily to Parmentier’s translation: Parmentier has translated the
Letter with a particular point of view in mind. Frankenberg, who is notable for the care of his
translations, takes ‘naked mind (nous)’ to refer to a future state, as indeed does Fr Bunge.[3]
In Frankenberg’s translation, the condition of the naked mind (nous) without a name and
whose region is unknown could very well refer to the henad of naked minds (noes) in the
Restoration.

Second, while it is undoubtedly true that in the Evagrian system, the Christ has the gnosis of
the Unity inseparably in him and that after the Movement he is the only mind (nous) in that
condition, by incarnation the ‘Christ has departed from his Paradise’ (KG V, 1) into the
various worlds for the salvation of all the minds (noes), and it is therefore not clear that the
appellation ‘naked mind’ is appropriate to him any longer, until the Restoration. This
characterization seems more appropriate to the Evagrian Christ: ‘There is only one of these
who has acquired common names with the others.’ (KG II, 24.)

Third, in his interpretation, Parmentier ignores the ascetico-contemplative dimension of the

Kephalaia Gnostica: the Restoration can be anticipated by the ascetic in contemplation; the
ascetic can experience the gnosis of the Unity in this life and hence attain to a (relative)
nakedness of mind (nous). On this, see below the passage of St Isaac the Syrian that we
discuss that interprets Evagrius’ ‘naked mind’ from the contemplative point of view. It is in
this contemplative condition that the ascetic can answer the question what is the nature of
his mind (nous)—but in that condition there will not even be the question.[4] Moreover, we
ourselves see KG I, 65, quoted by Parmentier, as equally applicable to the contemplative
experience of the Unity, not just to its experience in the Restoration.[5]
Finally, there is no sense in the Kephalaia Gnostica that the minds (noes), even that of the
Christ, are divine, as Parmentier seems to understand.[6] Indeed, we have seen in the
chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica quoted in the Section 3, above, that Evagrius quite
clearly distinguishes between the divinity of the Word, the Second Person of the Holy
Trinity, and the created nature of the mind (nous) which became the Christ and which has
the Word inseparably in itself. It is not even clear that the Letter teaches the divinity of the
minds (noes), even that of the Christ.

Chapter III -- 23

The mind (nous) is the seer of the Holy Trinity (III, 30). This is important. It gives us a very
important attribute of mind (nous). It very clearly states that in the Evagrian system God is
knowable, and by intuitive knowledge.

The perfect mind (nous) is that which easily can receive the essential gnosis (III, 12). This is a
definition of the perfection of the mind (nous): the perfect mind (nous) can easily enter into
the gnosis of the Holy Trinity, the final stage of the mystical ascent.

Just as a magnet attracts iron to itself by its natural power, so the holy gnosis naturally
attracts to itself the pure mind (nous) (II, 34). The holy gnosis is the gnosis of the Holy
Trinity.

The naked mind (nous) is that which, by the contemplation which concerns it, is united to
the gnosis of the Holy Trinity (III, 6). The phrase, repeated elsewhere, ‘by the contemplation
which concerns it’ regarding the mind (nous) is ambiguous; we think this ambiguity is due
more to the long chain of transmission and translation than to any obscurity in Evagrius’
thought. The ambiguity in this and in similar phrases is this: does Evagrius mean the
contemplation which the ascetic has concerning the naked mind (nous) or the contemplation
which the naked mind (nous) itself has of the Holy Trinity? We think that it is legitimate here
to draw on Anathema 14 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod for an explanation: ‘…that to the
gnosis concerning the reasonable beings follow the destruction of worlds, the deposition of
bodies and the <destruction> of names…’. In the Greek of the Anathema, it is quite clear that
what is meant is the contemplation which the mind (nous) has concerning the reasonable
beings: first natural contemplation at a particularly high level, the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of the reasonable beings.[1] What Evagrius seems to have in mind is this: at a
particular stage of the ascetico-mystical ascent, the ascetic enters into the contemplation
concerning the reasonable beings—elsewhere Evagrius states that this contemplation reveals
to the ascetic the nature of the Christ—and this contemplation, or its related gnosis, is the
final preparation of the mind (nous) for mystical union with the Holy Trinity, although, from
what we see elsewhere, it itself is not that mystical union.

It pertains to the naked mind (nous) to say what is its nature; and to this question there is
not now a response, but at the end there will not even be the question (III, 70). There is not
now a response, because the mind (nous) is not naked. The point is that the naked mind
(nous) is the one whose true nature has been uncovered. There will not even be a question
when the mind (nous) has become naked because it will have been completely absorbed into
the contemplation of the Unity. However, just below we will see another, ascetical,
interpretation of Evagrius’ ‘naked mind’, that of St Isaac the Syrian (7 th C.?–8th C.?). This
chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica can be interpreted both as an ascetical doctrine and as a
doctrine of the Restoration.

Gnosis has engendered gnosis, and it engenders the knower at all times (II, 81). This is
important for its assertion that gnosis—which we have already seen to be treated by Evagrius
as a kind of power or substance—has certain very specific effects on the mind (nous) which
participates in it. That is, we interpret this passage as a matter of ascetical doctrine and not
as a matter of the initial creation of the minds (noes), although it could perhaps be taken that
way.

Just as the senses are changed when they apprehend diverse qualities, thus also the mind
(nous) is changed when it ever gazes intently upon various contemplations (II, 83—Greek
fragment). Here we see that what Evagrius means is that the contemplation that a mind
(nous) engages in changes that mind (nous). We take this to be a change greater than a
passing alteration of disposition and less than a complete change to the substance of the
mind (nous) that would make it something other than what it is. From other passages of the
Kephalaia Gnostica, we know that this change is a nourishment of the mind (nous), although
Evagrius never explains how.
When the reasonable nature receives the contemplation which concerns it, then all the power
of the mind (nous) will be healthy (II, 15). We take this to refer to the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of the bodiless powers or minds (noes), of which the contemplating mind
(nous) would be one.[2]

When the mind (nous) will receive the essential gnosis, then it will be called God, also,
because it will also be able to found diverse worlds (V, 81). Here Evagrius is referring not to
the contemplation concerning the reasonable nature, but to the final stage of the mystical
ascent, Theology or the mind’s (nous’) mystical union with God. To say the least, this is not
the Orthodox doctrine of divinization (theosis). It does seem to have a basis in Peri Archon.
[3] We will discuss this chapter somewhat more extensively in Volume II, in our Digression
on the Evagrian doctrine of contemplation.

Just as man after having received the insufflation ‘is become a living soul’ (Gen. 2, 7), so also
the mind (nous) when it has received the Holy Trinity will become a living mind (nous) (III,
71). On the surface, and as far as it goes, this chapter does seem to contain the Orthodox
doctrine of divinization (theosis). Of course, this ‘living mind (nous)’ cannot in an Orthodox
sense be understood to be of the substance of God. We do not know whether Evagrius here
intends to assert that, however.

The light of the mind (nous) is divided into three, that is to say: into the gnosis of the
Adorable and Holy Trinity, into the incorporeal nature which has been created by the Trinity
and into the contemplation of beings (I, 74). We have already seen this tripartite division of
the contemplative life. The three lights are Theology, first natural contemplation and second
natural contemplation. We will discuss this in great detail in Volume II, in the Digression on
the Evagrian doctrine of contemplation.

Natural gnosis is the true comprehension by those reasonable beings which have been
produced for the gnosis of the Holy Trinity (I, 88). Natural gnosis is defined by Evagrius to
be the stage of the spiritual life below the gnosis of the Holy Trinity and above praktike, the
practical life. Since this includes the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of existent objects
of sense, the true comprehension that Evagrius is here referring to is not comprehension
concerning reasonable beings as objects but the comprehension by reasonable beings as
agents. However, the higher stage of natural contemplation, the contemplation of angels,
does include the intuitive comprehension by the reasonable nature which participates in the
contemplation, of the reasonable natures which are contemplated, and even of the reasons
(logoi) of those reasonable natures. In regard to the present chapter, the reader should recall
our discussion of Adam in Paradise, in Chapter II, above, of this work: he was able to give
names to the animals because he saw them as they were.

In accordance with nature, the first contemplation of nature is done to separate itself from
the mind (nous) and so as not to separate itself from it. Indeed, that which is taught is
separable, but that which appears in the mind (nous) which knows something is shown to be
inseparable (III, 27). This appears to be a doctrine that the object of knowledge is separable
from the mind (nous), whereas, in the mind (nous) which is contemplating, the gnosis itself
of the object of contemplation is inseparable from that mind (nous). We here take ‘the first
contemplation of nature’ to refer to natural contemplation both first and second. Skemmata
18 and 20 have a more advanced discussion of Evagrius’ doctrine on this subject.

Just as those who come into the cities to see their beauties are given over to wonder in
regarding each of their works, so also the mind (nous), when it draws near to the mental
representations of beings, will be filled with spiritual desire and will not give up its wonder
(V, 29). St Isaac the Syrian emphasizes this wonder. Evagrius is here placing this wonder in
the first natural contemplation, the contemplation of angels.

Other is the power of the mind (nous) which sees the spiritual natures and other is that
which knows the contemplation which concerns them. But one is the power which sees and
comprehends and Holy Trinity (V, 60). This passage is important for the clear distinction it
makes, present in many other places of the Kephalaia Gnostica but not so clearly stated, that
there is a difference between the contemplation which sees the angels and the contemplation
which concerns itself with the reasons (logoi) of the angels or, more generally, the minds
(noes). They are two different contemplations, and here, Evagrius is saying, each
contemplation involves a different faculty of the mind (nous). However, Evagrius says, the
faculty with which the mind (nous) contemplates the Holy Trinity is one. A similar doctrine
is found in Chapter 42 of On the Thoughts; we will discuss it in Volume II in our
commentary on that work.
All that which falls under the power of the mind (nous) which sees the incorporeal beings,
the angels, is also absolutely of the nature of that mind (nous), but that which is seen by the
angel cannot be connatural to that mind (nous) which is contemplating the angel, if it is the
same angel which knows the mental representations both of incorporeals and of the Holy
Trinity (V, 79). This passage, very difficult to comprehend, seems to be based on the
proposition that the mind (nous) cannot be connatural to the Holy Trinity. Hence, while in
contemplating an angel, the mind (nous) contemplates what is connatural to it—the angel—
what the angel contemplates in contemplating both angels and the Holy Trinity is not
connatural to the mind (nous) contemplating the angel, because that mind (nous) is not
connatural to the Holy Trinity.

The contemplation of the bodiless powers remains in non-abasement; as for the

contemplation that concerns bodies, it appears in part capable of abasing itself and in part
incapable of abasing itself (II, 71). We do not know the significance of this chapter for the
Evagrian doctrine of contemplation.

It is the property of angels to nourish themselves at all times with the contemplation of
beings, that of men not to nourish themselves with it at all times, and that of the demons not
to nourish themselves with it either at one time or another (III, 4). This is important for its
presentation of the Evagrian doctrine that the angels nourish themselves with the
contemplation of beings, and not only with the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Similarly
for men. St John of Damascus asserts that in Paradise Adam and Eve were nourished with
the contemplation of God; nowhere in Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is there a
doctrine that men are nourished, even after the Fall, with natural contemplation.[4] The
Fathers in general, as far as we know, are silent on such a point. That the demons should not
nourish themselves with natural contemplation seems clear enough. There is an ambiguity in
this chapter: is the contemplation of beings both first and second natural contemplation, or
only second natural contemplation? For elsewhere Evagrius says that the angels nourish
themselves with second natural contemplation.

If the gnosis of those who do not empty themselves all at once is first, it is evident that the
light bodies are anterior to the heavy (II, 72). We do not know precisely what this means.
 Chapter III -- 24

The mind (nous) which possesses the last clothing is that mind (nous) which knows only the
contemplation of all the second beings (III, 8). The contemplation of all the second beings is
second natural contemplation. This is a very important, although very ambiguous, chapter.
What is the last clothing of the mind (nous)? We have seen someone assert that it is the
passions. We do not think so. For we learn elsewhere in Evagrius that dispassion (apatheia)
is the precondition for entry into the second natural contemplation, and dispassion
(apatheia) is precisely the divestiture of the passions: they have been divested before the
ascetic enters into second natural contemplation, not after, as Evagrius is here discussing.

For reasons we will see at the beginning of Section 6, ‘The Evagrian Anthropology’, we think
that for Evagrius, eschatologically, the last clothing of the mind (nous) is the soul.

However, a passage in Homily 3 of St Isaac the Syrian provides us with another, ascetical,
interpretation. It must be remarked, first, that St Isaac the Syrian undoubtedly read the
Kephalaia Gnostica in the version commune (S1), so his interpretation of Evagrius, although
based on mystical experience of the highest kind, cannot be considered to be absolutely
reliable. However, the passage in question, contained in the Syriac of Homily 3 but omitted
in the Greek translation done in the Byzantine era at the Monastery of St Savas near
Jerusalem, is very important for its very clear description of the Evagrian stages of
contemplation and for its discussion of the final clothing of the mind (nous), although the
translation from the Syriac is rather obscure because of the English translator’s lack of
familiarity with Evagrius. Because of its importance, we here quote the passage in full:

That which a material object is to the eyes of the flesh, the same is passionate behaviour to the hidden
faculty of sight. And that which the murky passions are to the second mode of natural theoria [= second
natural contemplation], the same the passions are to the natural settled state; and they are thus related
to one another throughout the range of the diverse theorias [i.e. contemplations]. When the intellect [=

nous] is fixed in the natural, settled state [= dispassion] [1], it abides in angelic theoria [=
contemplation of the angels], that is, primary and natural theoria [= first natural contemplation], which
is also called naked intellect [= naked mind (nous)]. But when the intellect [= nous] is in the second,
natural knowledge [= the gnosis related to second natural contemplation], it suckles and is sustained by
milk from the breasts [cf. KG III, 67], as it were [i.e. the second natural contemplation is the
contemplation of an imperfect mind (nous)]. This is called the outward garment of the degree just
mentioned [i.e. the naked intellect [remark by the English translator]]. It is placed after purity [=
dispassion (apatheia)], which the mind enters first. It is also prior in existence, for it is the first degree
 of knowledge, although it is last in honour [i.e. after dispassion (apatheia), the ascetic first attains to
second natural contemplation, the lowest stage of contemplation]. For this reason it is also called
secondary [i.e. second, in contradistinction to first, natural contemplation], and is like certain inscribed
letters [cf. KG III, 57] whereby the intellect [= nous] is trained and cleansed for the ascent to the second
degree [i.e. first natural contemplation], which is perfection of the motions of the mind [= nous] and the
degree that is nigh to divine theoria [= Theology, contemplation of the Holy Trinity]. The outward
garment of the intellect [mind] is the senses, but its nakedness is its being moved by immaterial divine

visions.[2] [All emphasis in original.]

Here, it can be seen that ascetically, the final or outward garment of the mind (nous) is the
senses: the second natural contemplation, being the contemplation of an imperfect mind
(nous) still requires the senses, but the senses are divested in the transformation from
second natural contemplation to first natural contemplation. Note that St Isaac states that
the second natural contemplation is ‘the outward garment of the degree just mentioned’: the
English translator construes ‘the degree just mentioned’ to be ‘the naked intellect’, but would
it not be more precise to say that it refers to ‘the first natural contemplation’? This
interpretation by St Isaac of the final clothing of the mind (nous) does seem to be a very
likely explanation of what Evagrius means in the present chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica:
ascetically, the final clothing of the mind (nous) is the senses.

The notion that eschatologically—not ascetically, as St Isaac is discussing in the passage

quoted—the soul is the final clothing of the mind (nous) is not so very far from the ascetical
notion that the senses are final clothing of the mind (nous): to a certain extent it is being
clothed with the soul that confers on the mind (nous) the possibility of sense-perception,
although just as clearly the body is also necessary. However, the Evagrian doctrine of the
spiritual body received in the General Resurrection, the ‘gnostic organon’ which is divested
in the passage to the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration, does not at all address
the issue of the relation between that spiritual body and the soul (psuche). Hence, asserting
that eschatologically the final clothing of the mind (nous) is the soul (psuche) might be
incompatible with the doctrine of Evagrius concerning the spiritual body—although it might
not be, given Evagrius’ silence on the matter.[3]

[1] On the basis of a personal communication with the translator, Dr Dana Miller, presently of Fordham University,
New York.
 Chapter III -- 25

Just as the pledge or guarantee which is in the body is a small part of the body, so also the
pledge or guarantee which is in the gnoses is a certain part of the gnosis of beings (IV, 14).
This seems to say that the mind (nous), being small and finite, can contain within itself only
a very small part of natural gnosis.

The ignorance of him whose gnosis is limited, is also limited; and the gnosis of him whose
ignorance is unlimited, is also unlimited (III, 63). If someone has a limited gnosis, he has at
least some gnosis. That small part of gnosis limits his ignorance. If, however, he is
completely ignorant, and therefore completely without gnosis, the gnosis that lies before him
to be attained is unlimited.

Gnosis does not advance in the regions of ignorance but in the regions of gnosis (II, 54).
From gnosis we advance to more and higher gnosis, not in regions of ignorance. There is a
deeper meaning to this passage that is found in Gnostic 44.[1] There, Evagrius states that the
manly ascetic does not enter into ‘those things which do not exist’. He clearly is referring in
that passage to those things which pertain to the demons, to demonic gnosis. Hence, here,
Evagrius is saying the same thing: gnosis does not advance in the regions of demonic gnosis
but in the regions of genuine gnosis.

The mind (nous), if it advances on its proper path, meets the holy powers, the angels; if it
advances on the path of the organon, or tool, of the soul, which is the body, it will fall on the
demons (II, 48).

Some have attracted ignorance to themselves by their will, and others involuntarily. The
second are called captives and the first are named captivators: ‘The captivators have come
and they have taken captives.’ (Job 1, 15.) (II, 55.)

The mind (nous) which possesses a body does not see the incorporeals; and when it is
without a body, it will not see the bodies (IV, 86). This is important for its doctrine of the
limitation of the power of the mind (nous) occasioned by its presence in a body. However, as
we shall see in Volume II, for Evagrius, ascesis is the separation of the soul, which contains
the mind (nous), from the body, not, however, by suicide; and that separation allows the
ascetic to engage in the first natural contemplation, the contemplation of the incorporeals,
the angels. Of course, the last part of the sentence is saying that after death, the mind (nous)
no longer sees corporeal objects, but it also has the meaning that when the ascetic has
separated himself from his body in ascesis, he no longer has a true cognition of sensible
bodies.[2]

Just as it is not possible that a reasonable nature might with the body be outside the world,
so it is not possible that it might outside the body be in the world (VI, 81). This says much the
same thing as the previous chapter, but with a restriction of its content to the actual presence
or absence of the mind (nous) in the body, there being no application to ascesis.

The mind (nous) teaches the soul and the soul the body; and only the ‘man of God’ (Deut. 33,
1) knows the man of gnosis (II, 56). This chapter is very important for its presentation of the
relation between mind (nous) and soul. In the Evagrian system, they are not the same thing.
Evagrius is not speaking figuratively here; he really does mean that the mind (nous) has a
relationship to the soul similar to the relationship that the soul has to the body. The ‘man of
God’ is probably the one who has attained to Theology, the contemplation of the Holy
Trinity. Perhaps the ‘man of gnosis’ is he who has attained to natural contemplation. Then
the sense would be that the man who has attained to Theology can judge the man who has
attained only to natural contemplation. The chapter, however, is somewhat ambiguous.
Possibly it is parallel in meaning to the following passage:

The body of that which is, is the contemplation of beings, and the soul of that which is, is the
gnosis of the Unity. He who knows the soul is called the soul of that which is, and those who
know the body are named body of this soul (II, 5). This idea does not otherwise seem to be
developed anywhere else, although it might conceivably have a connection to the Letter to
Melania.

In the beginning, before the Movement, the mind (nous) had the incorruptible God as
teacher of the immaterial mental representations; but now, when it has been joined after the
Movement to a sensible body, it has received corruptible sense-perception as teacher of the
material mental representations (III, 55).
 Chapter III -- 26

The sense and the mind (nous) divide among themselves the sensible things, but the mind
(nous) alone has the intelligible things (noeta), for the mind (nous) becomes a seer both of
the objects and of the reasons (logoi) (II, 45—Greek fragment). This is very important for
Evagrius’ psychology. In regard to the perception of sensible objects, the organs of sense and
the mind (nous) work together. In regard to the intuitive cognition of intelligible things,
however, the mind (nous) works alone. Thus the mind (nous) becomes the seer both of
sensible objects and of their intelligible reasons (logoi). In the Evagrian system, the mind
(nous) receives the mental representations of intelligibles in a way analogous but not
identical to the way it receives the mental representations of sensible objects.[1] Note that
the transformation from second to first natural contemplation that St Isaac the Syrian
construes to be based on the divestiture by the mind (nous) of the senses is based on the
doctrine expressed in this chapter. For it is when the mind (nous) has divested itself of the
senses that it can receive fully the mental representations of intelligibles, including the
reasons (logoi) of sensible objects to which Evagrius is referring in this chapter.

The objects that by means of the senses fall under the sense-perception of the soul move it to
receive in itself their forms or mental representations, because it is the work of the mind
(nous) to know, just as the animals which respire from without must breathe, and it falls into
danger if it does not work, if, according to the word of the wise Solomon, ‘The light of the
Lord is the breath of men.’ (Prov. 20, 27.) (IV, 67.) The reference to ‘soul’ might be an error
in transmission and translation: we will see below that it is the mind (nous) that for Evagrius
is the agent of perception. However, it may be that the soul is the mind’s (nous’) instrument
of sense-perception. Otherwise, the chapter is important for its remark that the mind (nous)
must be doing something: its work being to know, it cannot remain idle. Evagrius is here
applying this to contemplative psychology, but it is also very important for ascetical
psychology: the ascetic cannot have his mind (nous) idle; it must be doing something. This is
one of the purposes of the Jesus Prayer, to give the ascetic’s mind something to do.

The mind (nous) also possesses five spiritual senses through which it apprehends its familiar
materials: sight presents to it bare the intelligible objects themselves; the hearing receives
the reasons (logoi) concerning those intelligible objects; the sense of smell enjoys the aroma
which is unmixed with any lie; and the mouth partakes of the pleasure which is from those
intelligible objects; by means of the sense of touch, then, the mind (nous) is confirmed with
the exact proof of the objects received (II, 35—Greek fragment). This is a very important
passage for its assertion of the existence of spiritual senses and for its description of them.
There is a parallel passage in Peri Archon.[2] These spiritual senses should not be
understood as sorts of invisible eyes and ears superimposed on the physical eyes and ears:
Evagrius is speaking metaphorically of certain spiritual or intelligible faculties of the mind
(nous) that function when the mind (nous) cognizes intuitively some intelligible aspect of a
sensible object, or else when it cognizes intuitively some intelligible object. It then receives
the mental representations of intelligibles that we have referred to above.[3]

The sensible eye, when it regards something visible, does not see the whole of it; but the
intelligible eye (the mind, or nous) either has not seen, or, when it sees, immediately
surrounds from all sides that which it sees (II, 28). This passage is very important for an
understanding of the nature of the spiritual senses, and especially for an understanding of
the nature of clairvoyance and prevoyance. Either the ascetic knows something by the
intelligible eye or he does not. This is not to deny that, in proportion to the gift of
clairvoyance and in proportion to the purity of the ascetic’s mind (nous), the object seen
‘from all sides’ will be seen in greater or lesser depth or clarity. As we will later see in
Question 604 of St Barsanuphios, discussed in Section 12, no saint has the depth of the
wisdom of God. However, St Barsanuphios was himself an astonishing example of what
Evagrius is discussing here. Evagrius qualifies this doctrine in Chapter 40 of the Gnostic; we
will discuss that further below.[4]

It is said that the mind (nous) sees the things which it knows and that it does not see the
things which it does not know; on account of this, it is not all the thoughts which for it
prohibit the gnosis of God, but those which assail the irascible part (thumos) and the
desiring part (epithumia) and which are contrary to nature (VI, 83). This is very important
for the Evagrian theory of ascesis. We shall deal with its content, although not literally, in
extenso in Volume II. We shall also refer to this chapter explicitly there.

One thing is the mental representation of the matter; another is that mental representation
of the attribute which can make the matter known; another is that mental representation of
the sensible object’s internal part near to the elements; another is that mental representation
of the sensible elements; another is the contemplation of the body; and another is that
contemplation of the human organon or body (VI, 72). A mental representation and a
contemplation are not precisely the same thing. The mental representation is an ‘image’ in
the mind (nous), in the first instance of a sensible object and in the second instance of an
intelligible object. Contemplation is a relation of seeing between a mind (nous) and an
intelligible object wherein the mind (nous) receives, in a manner analogous to receiving the
mental representation of a sensible object, the mental representation of an intelligible object.
When we say ‘intelligible object’, we of course do not mean that intelligibles are the same
sorts of things as sensible objects. In this chapter Evagrius has described a number of
different types of mental representation related to sensible objects. We think that these
mental representations are related to second natural contemplation, not to ordinary sense-
perception. Moreover, in Volume II we shall see that Evagrius understands that such-and-
such mental representation is the vehicle by means of which the mind (nous) receives such-
and-such gnosis or contemplation. Hence, here, the mental representations listed by
Evagrius correspond to types of second natural contemplation.

The knowing natures examine the objects and the gnosis of the objects purifies the knowers
(V, 76). We think that Evagrius is here referring to the second natural contemplation, in
which the mind (nous) receives the mental representation of the reason (logos) of a sensible
object, although he could very well be referring to natural contemplation generally. The
sensible object is, of course, sensible, and it has a mental representation which the mind
(nous) receives by means of the sense organs. The object’s reason (logos), however, is
intelligible and not sensible, and in the second natural contemplation, the mind (nous)
receives the mental representation not of the sensible object but of the reason (logos) of that
sensible object. In the second natural contemplation, one begins with the sensible object
before him and then goes beyond the sensible mental representation to the intelligible
mental representation of the reason (logos) of that object, all the while having the sensible
object before him.

This dependence on the presence of the sensible object accounts for Evagrius’ doctrine that
the second natural contemplation is the contemplation of an imperfect mind (nous), and for
St Isaac the Syrian’s interpretation that the last garment of the mind (nous) is the senses,
which garment the ascetic divests when he passes from second natural contemplation to first
natural contemplation. For in first natural contemplation the mind (nous) surpasses the
need for the presence of the sensible object, and cognizes the mental representations both of
angels and of their reasons (logoi) without depending on the presence of a sensible object,
although it appears that the intelligible object, the angel, must itself be present. Moreover, in
the even higher stage of contemplation of the Holy Trinity, there is no longer an object of
contemplation: the contemplation of the Holy Trinity is a different sort of contemplation
where one no longer speaks of an object of contemplation:

The objects are outside the mind (nous), and the contemplation which concerns them is
constituted inside it. But it is not so in regard to the Holy Trinity, for only it is essential
gnosis (IV, 77). In the second and first natural contemplations, the object, whether the
sensible object or the angel, is actually an objectively existent object—even if intelligible as in
the case of an angel—and that object is outside the mind (nous). The contemplation which
concerns the object, however, is inside the mind (nous). However, in the case of the
contemplation of the Holy Trinity, this distinction of mind (nous) and object is lost. Evagrius
gives as reason the fact that only the Holy Trinity is essential gnosis. This is difficult to
understand, but it appears to mean this:

When the mind (nous) contemplates, it is conformed by the gnosis that corresponds to the
contemplation. When we say that the contemplating mind (nous) is conformed by the gnosis
that corresponds to the contemplation, we mean, roughly, that the contemplator’s
consciousness is altered to conform to that gnosis. When the mind (nous) contemplates the
Holy Trinity, however, it is conformed by the gnosis of the Holy Trinity, which gnosis is the
Holy Trinity itself. The Holy Trinity is essential gnosis, and so the gnosis that conforms the
mind (nous) in the contemplation of the Holy Trinity is in fact the very substance of the Holy
Trinity, so that the distinction between the gnosis and the object of gnosis is lost. This is a
doctrine of the union of the mind (nous) with the substance of the Holy Trinity, which
substance is essential gnosis.

The problem in all mysticisms, of course, that deal with the knowledge of a transcendent God
is to account for knowledge of or union with the transcendent Other. Here, Evagrius has
adopted the solution of making gnosis the very substance of the Godhead: in our estimation,
this is the significance of Evagrius’ oft-repeated statement that the Holy Trinity is essential
gnosis. This is not an Orthodox Trinitarian theology: in Palamite theology it is the uncreated
operations (aktistes energeies) of God, whose substance is never identified with gnosis,
which effect the gnosis of the Holy Trinity.
[3] We will discuss this doctrine in Volume II, in the commentary on On the Thoughts and in the Digression.

[4] We will also discuss this matter fully in Volume II, in the commentary on On the Thoughts and in the Digression.

Chapter III -- 27

The mind (nous) is in wonder when it sees the objects and it is not disturbed in their
contemplation; but it runs as towards its familiars and friends (V, 73). This is an interesting
remark on the psychology of contemplation.

God has planted for himself the reasonable beings; his wisdom, in its turn, has grown in
them, in their reading writings of every sort (IV, 1). These writings are the reasons (logoi) of
created objects which the reasonable beings contemplate in creation by means of the second
natural contemplation. We shall see a parallel assertion in Chapter 94 of Treatise on the
Practical Life, where St Anthony is presented by Evagrius as saying much the same thing as
he says here.[1] We will even find the image of the book that is read to be used by St
Hesychios, evidently for the same stage of contemplation.[2] However, this is not discursive
meditation: as we have seen, the ascetic exercising second natural contemplation
apprehends the reason (logos) of the created object intuitively by means of the intelligible
eye, the spiritual sense which either has seen the reason (logos) from all sides or not seen it
at all (cf. KG II, 28, discussed earlier).

If the mind (nous) discerns the words and if the names and the words make known the
objects, then the mind (nous) discerns the objects (VI, 54). We think that this passage, quite
ambiguous in its terminology, refers to the second natural contemplation. To obtain this
reading, we would have to take ‘words’ to be a rendering of the Greek ‘logoi’, the reasons
(logoi) of the objects of sense that are contemplated in second natural contemplation. By
means of the reasons (logoi) of sensible objects, Evagrius seems to be saying, the mind
(nous) with its spiritual senses truly cognizes the objects of sense. This would be the meaning
of ‘discerns the objects’. The ‘names’ would be the definitions of the objects which disclose
the objects’ essences. Recall that in Paradise, Adam saw things as they were. This chapter
could also apply to first natural contemplation.
The more the mind (nous) divests itself of the passions, the more it approaches the objects
and according to its order it also receives the gnosis; and it knows the contemplation of each
order in which it stands as its very own (V, 75). Ordinarily, in the Evagrian system, the
passions are associated with the soul (psuche), not with the mind (nous), and they are
divested through praktike, the practical life, which pertains to the purification of the
passionate part of the soul, not to the purification of the mind (nous).[3] However, the
general sense of this passage is clear: the more the mind (nous) is purified, the more it
approaches the objects of contemplation, and, moreover, by the principle that gnosis both
changes and engenders the mind (nous), it comes to possess the contemplation related to its
degree of attainment as its own inalienable possession (subject to its free choice to turn away
from gnosis). Recall that the gnosis that a mind (nous) is in, is the place of that mind (nous).

The mind (nous) applies itself to the intelligible things at that very time, when it should no
longer be conformed (poiotai) by the thoughts (logismoi) from the passionate part of the
soul (VI, 55—Greek fragment). We will see much more of this in Volume II. It is a very
important statement of the necessity of freeing the mind (nous) from attachments to sensible
objects so that it might be able to receive in contemplation the mental representations of
intelligibles: that freeing can only come about when the mind (nous) is freed from the
thoughts (logismoi) which come from the passionate part of the soul. The passionate part of
the soul is the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) taken together. The
mind (nous) can begin to contemplate intelligibles only after it has been freed from the
mental representations that relate to sensible objects, and this freeing can only come about
when the mind (nous) no longer unites itself to the thoughts (logismoi) which arise from the
passionate part of the soul. This is at the heart of Evagrius’ ascetical psychology and
psychology of contemplation. He enunciates this doctrine in Chapter 40 of On the Thoughts
and also in Skemmata 2 and 23.

The true reason (logos) which concerns the intelligible objects has not been entrusted from
now to all the seers of those intelligible objects; and it is no more those to whom have been
entrusted their reasons (logoi), so that they see them, who see also their objects. But there
are in this some who even obtain both these distinctions, those who are called ‘the first-born
of their brothers’ (Rom. 8, 29) (II, 36). The distinction that Evagrius is drawing might be
compared to the difference between the charism of knowledge and the charism of the word
of wisdom. More Orthodox ascetical Fathers than Evagrius assert that it is only rarely that
the two charisms are together given to the same person. Most often, an ascetic is given the
one and not the other. Here, Evagrius is making the point that it is not the same thing to
contemplate the angel and to know spiritually the reason (logos) of the angel. To most
ascetics is given either the one or the other, not both. Those who are given both
contemplations are distinguished from their fellow ascetics in being more eminent
spiritually.

That mind (nous) is sterile which is deprived of the spiritual doctrine or which lacks the
seeds sown by the Holy Spirit (VI, 60). The seeds sown by the Holy Spirit are the seeds of the
virtues, which are elsewhere said by Evagrius to be imperishable. He must mean,
metaphorically, that the mind (nous) incapable of virtue or incapable of attaining to spiritual
doctrine is a sterile mind (nous).

Chapter III -- 28

6 The Evagrian Anthropology

From the angelic and archangelic states come the soul state; from the soul state come the
demonic and the human states; from the human state again come angels and demons [to
here, following the Greek fragment], if a demon is he who, on account of the abundance of
anger (thumos), has fallen from praktike and has been joined with a dark and attenuated
body (V, 11). This is a very important chapter, the first part of which, combined with KG II,
78, is quoted verbatim by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 5.[1] The importance of
the chapter lies first in its clear enunciation of a doctrine of the mobility of the minds (noes)
among the orders of archangels, angels, men and demons. In both Evagrius’ and Origen’s
systems, as we have already indicated, the mind (nous) is subject to repeated incarnations in
various bodies according to its merit in its previous life: this is the basis of the mobility of the
minds (noes) among the orders. This is not an Orthodox doctrine. However, this chapter
contains a concept which is crucial to an understanding of Evagrius’ anthropology. This is
the concept of the order of souls. This chapter and the next two presented are the only three
chapters in the Kephalaia Gnostica that enunciate this doctrine. However, that the Fathers
of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod went to the trouble of anathematizing the doctrine verbatim
indicates that the doctrine was among the most important of the doctrines that the Origenist
movement held that they were combating. Moreover, the doctrine is very clearly enunciated
in Peri Archon even in Rufinus’ translation:
All these considerations seem to me to show that when the mind departed from its original condition
and dignity it became or was termed a soul, and if ever it is restored and corrected it returns to the

condition of being a mind.[2]

Evagrius’ doctrine seems to have this sense: When the mind (nous) is judged in such a
fashion as to be given a praktike body,[3] then, it appears, it does not enter directly into the
order of men by being born, but enters into the order of souls.[4] This order of souls is not
clearly defined by Evagrius, but seems to be an order of unembodied souls, where the soul
(psuche) is treated by Evagrius as an inferior sort of angelic body for the mind (nous). For us,
the importance of this concept is that it affords us an approach to the Evagrian (and
Origenist) distinction between mind (nous) and soul (psuche). These are not the same thing
in Evagrius, and in reading Evagrius, we must be careful not to treat ‘mind (nous)’ and ‘soul
(psuche)’ as synonymous; otherwise we will come to mistaken conclusions about the content
of Evagrius’ doctrine. We can now see the significance of the next chapter, which we
originally cited and discussed in connection with the Evagrian Christology:

Is it that Gabriel has announced to Mary the going out of the Christ from the Father, or his
coming from the world of angels to the world of men? Search also on the subject of the
disciples who have lived with him in his corporeity, if they have come with him from the
world which is seen by us or from another world or from other worlds and if it is some of
them, or else all. Moreover, search again if it is from the soul state that they had that they
happened to become disciples of Christ (VI, 77). Here, we are interested in this chapter solely
from the point of view of the Evagrian anthropology. As we have already remarked, we think
that Evagrius poses rhetorical questions when the content of his teaching is too dangerous to
state openly. Here, what is in question is the status of Christ’s immediate disciples, especially
the Apostles. Where did they come from? Were they simply common fishermen who
happened to be living by the side of Lake Tiberias? Evagrius seems to be suggesting that they
were not, that they came from other worlds, and not all of them from the same world. To
dispose of the last point first, we imagine that Evagrius wants to say that Judas came from a
demonic world, and that he was born a man for the occasion, as it were, of Christ’s
incarnation, to be his disciple. This of course is not in the least an Orthodox doctrine.
However, we think that the import of this chapter is also that the other immediate disciples
of Christ came not from the world of men in the ordinary sense, but were born into the world
of men for the occasion of Christ’s incarnation either from the order of souls, the most
probable interpretation, or from even higher worlds. Moreover, Evagrius seems to be saying,
the Apostles, or at least some of them, did not become the disciples of Christ just on earth,
but had already been disciples of Christ when the Christ himself was in the soul or other
higher state before incarnating into the womb of Mary. This is again not an Orthodox
doctrine. But it helps us to understand Evagrius’ thought. It also helps us to understand how
Evagrius conceives the relation between the mind (nous) and the soul (psuche), so that we
can correctly interpret his texts. The next chapter makes the matter clear:

The soul (psuche) is the mind (nous) which because of negligence has fallen from the Unity
and which by consequence of its non-vigilance has descended to the rank of praktike (III,
28). As we have already learned, in the Evagrian system, only the Christ was free of
negligence in the Movement, and all the other minds (noes) were subject to the subsequent
judgement by the Christ and to the receiving of a body and a world. Therefore we are now
looking at a subclass of those minds (noes). These are the minds (noes) which had sufficient
negligence to be given a soul that had the rank of praktike, which we shall explain, but not so
much negligence as to be given a demonic body. As we have already seen, the Evagrian
soteriological program for the mind (nous), in whatever world it might find itself with its
body in the rank that it has been given by the Christ, is to turn to the upward mystical ascent.
The mind (nous) which finds itself in the human state can either ascend to the angelic state
or descend to the demonic state. As the first chapter presented indicates, interposed between
the angelic state and the human state is the soul state.

In our understanding, Evagrius is teaching that in the Movement, some souls had sufficient
negligence to be given the rank of praktike, and that they were therefore given souls. It is
only their later behaviour, in the soul state, that leads, in a further judgement, to their being
given a human body.[5]

Professor Guillaumont quotes the Letter to Melania to say: ‘The mind (nous) fell from its
first rank and was called soul … and it descended again and was called body.’ [6] It is because
of this passage that Professor Guillaumont remarks that the Letter to Melania appears to be
rather hastily composed, since, he believes, the Kephalaia Gnostica does not contain such a
doctrine.[7] We disagree. We think that the Kephalaia Gnostica does show the same
doctrine that Professor Guillaumont quotes from the Letter. That doctrine is contained in
precisely the chapters that we have quoted above concerning the soul state and its relation to
the state of man in the body. As we remarked above, that this was an important doctrine of
the Origenists, and not merely a chance remark of Evagrius in the Kephalaia Gnostica, or
even, perhaps, in the Letter to Melania, can be discerned from the fact that the Fathers of the
Fifth Ecumenical Synod went to the trouble of quoting and anathematizing the relevant
passage of the Kephalaia Gnostica verbatim. Professor Guillaumont adduces as an argument
KG I, 47, which we will present in a page or so. That chapter says that the soul is naturally
made to be in the body. If this is not to be taken as an inconsistency in Evagrius’ thought,
then it must be understood in the sense that the soul is naturally made to be in a body, even
though it can exist outside the body in the soul state. Even St Thomas Aquinas in the Summa
Theologiae says the same thing about the human soul: the soul is naturally made to be in the
body, but it can exist (in Heaven, after death, until the Resurrection) outside the body.[8] It
seems to us that it is necessary to accept that Evagrius, following Peri Archon, makes a
distinction between mind (nous) and soul (psuche), and soul (psuche) and body, so that we
properly understand the Evagrian concept of praktike as the healing of the soul (psuche).

These things having been said, we are reserved about the Evagrianness of the extended
doctrine of the Letter to Melania concerning the relations among the body, soul (psuche)
and mind (nous) in the context of their relations with the Persons of the Trinity: this is the
doctrine that the human mind (nous) is the body of the soul (psuche) of God, which soul
(psuche) of God is the Persons of the Son and the Holy Spirit; and that that soul (psuche) of
God is itself the soul (psuche) of the mind (nous) of God, which is the Father.[9] There is no
evidence of such a Neoplatonic doctrine in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

[1] However, the fragment used is taken from St Maximos the Confessor.

[4] Here, with regard to the French text of the Kephalaia Gnostica, it should be understood that the French word,
psychique, is directly related etymologically to the Greek word for soul, psuche.

[5] There are many judgements subsequent to the first.

Chapter III -- 29

There is nothing among the bodiless powers which might be in power in the bodies; indeed,
our soul is bodiless (I, 45). We now learn that our soul (psuche) is bodiless: although it
inhabits the body, it has no intrinsic connection to the body: the soul (psuche) is not part of
the sensible order of creation. The significance of the first clause of this chapter is that the
bodiless powers, being minds (noes) with angelic bodies, do not have the faculties that are
found in the sensible creation.[1] This is a consequence of the distinction that Evagrius
draws between the intelligible and the sensible orders of creation. He is saying that the
bodiless powers, despite their having an angelic body, have no intrinsic connection with the
sensible creation as concerns their powers. Evagrius then goes on to affirm that his remark
applies also to the human soul, the mind (nous) which has descended to the rank of
praktike. In the next chapter, Evagrius makes a remark, in the form of a question, about the
relation between the body and soul (psuche) of man:

Who will understand the constitution of the world and the activity of the elements? Who will
comprehend the composition of this body, this tool (organon), of our soul? Or who will
scrutinize how the latter is joined to the former, what is their empire and their participation
the one in the other, in such a way that the practical life (praktike) might become a vehicle
for the reasonable soul which applies itself to come to the gnosis of God (I, 67)? Here, it is
clear, Evagrius is stating that the soul (psuche) has received the body to be able to use the
practical life (praktike) as a vehicle to come to the gnosis of God. The body is the instrument
of the soul for the exercise of the practical life (praktike).

It is not the bodies of the spiritual powers, but the bodies of the souls only, which are
naturally made to nourish themselves from the world which is related to them (II, 82). The
bodies of the souls are ordinary human bodies, which are made to nourish themselves from
the ordinary world of men: you and I eat. The angelic bodies of the spiritual powers,
however, says Evagrius, do not have the capacity of nourishing themselves from the world
which is related to them. Recall that in the Evagrian system, to each body corresponds a
world. To each type of angelic body corresponds an angelic world. However, says Evagrius,
the angelic body is not made to be nourished from the angelic world. The angelic orders are
nourished by second natural contemplation of the world of men:

The mental representations of things which are on the earth are ‘the goods of the earth’. But
if the holy angels ‘know’ these latter things, according to the word of the woman of Tekoa (cf.
2 Kgs. 14, 20; 2 Kgs. 14, 1–3), the angels of God eat the goods of the earth. But it is said that
‘man has eaten the bread of angels’ (Ps. 77, 25); it is therefore evident that some ones also
among men have known the mental representations of that which is on the earth (I, 23). The
first two sentences further explain the sense of the preceding chapter. The second natural
contemplation that the angelic orders engage in is the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of
the things that are on the earth of men. We take ‘mental representations’ here to refer to
those reasons (logoi). The earth of men has a very special role in the system of worlds in the
Evagrian system. It is from the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the things on the
earth that the angels are nourished. This is an unusual doctrine. We do not know why
Evagrius came to assert it. Of course, it is possible that what Evagrius means is that inter
alia the angels nourish themselves by means of the second natural contemplation. That this
might be the case can be seen from Evagrius’ Scholium 3 on Psalm 23, 6, quoted by
Sinkewicz:

This is the generation of those who seek him, of those who seek the face of the
God of Jacob. If it belongs to the angels to behold the face of God continuously,
and if this is the face that human beings as well seek to see, then human beings
also seek the knowledge proper to angels, if indeed it is possible for a human
being to ‘eat the bread of angels’ (Ps. 77, 25).[2]

The significance of ‘mental representations’ in the chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica under
consideration is this: the ascetic in sense-perception bears the mental representation
produced by means of the sense organs into the mind (nous); in the second natural
contemplation he also bears into his mind (nous) the mental representation of the reason
(logos) of the object.[3]

[1] We have learned that all the minds (noes) were culpable in the Movement to a greater or lesser extent and were
therefore given some sort of body in the First Judgement. Hence, the bodiless powers have an angelic body, although
not a material body.

[3] The object itself must still be sensibly present on account of the imperfection of the ascetic’s mind (nous) at this
stage of contemplation

Chapter III -- 30

The sign of the human order is the human body, and the sign of each of the orders is the
breadth, the forms, the colours, the qualities, the natural forces, the weakness, the time, the
place, the parents, the increases, the modes, the life, the death and that which is connected to
these things (III, 29). This seems clear enough in the beginning: the sign of the human is the
human body. The orders next referred to constitute an ambiguity: are they the orders of men,
and is Evagrius explaining the differences among the orders or nations of men, or is he
speaking more generally about all the orders in which the minds (noes) find themselves? We
cannot give a certain answer. Neither answer produces any great difficulty, and both answers
are compatible the one with the other. We tend to think that Evagrius is referring to the
orders of men in this chapter, but the reader may take it how he prefers.

Although Evagrius takes the human condition to be the result of a degree of a negligence in
the Movement greater than that of the angelic powers, but less than that of the demons, he
does not have a negative attitude towards the human body. This appears to derive from his
view of the divine providence that the Evagrian Christ applied in his assignment of bodies
and worlds: after the judgement, each mind (nous) finds itself, in a body and in a world,
precisely where the wisdom of God has put it so that it might recommence its upward
mystical ascent. Hence, Evagrius sees the human body as an instrument or tool[1] which
enables man to make the upward mystical ascent. In the case of a human being, at the rank
that he finds himself, that upward ascent begins with praktike. Because of this attitude
towards the body, Evagrius is adamantly opposed to suicide, even at a stage when,
presumably, the ascetic has made enough progress to be impeded from the higher forms of
contemplation by being in the body.[2] We have ignored the chapters of the Kephalaia
Gnostica concerning suicide as being largely irrelevant to our purpose, but to manifest
Evagrius’ attitude towards the body we include this one:

Who will show to those who blaspheme against the Creator and speak evil of the body of our
soul, the grace that they have received to have been joined to such a tool (organon) while
they are passionate? Those testify in favour of my words who in the apparitions of dreams
are terrified by the demons and flee to waking as into the presence of angels, when the body
suddenly awakes (IV, 60).

[1] That is the meaning of the Greek word organon.

[2] Plotinus was opposed to suicide except in certain special cases such as captivity by barbarians. One can see that
suicide was a viable option in the late Classical Age. It was the Christian prohibition that eliminated it.

Chapter III -- 31

We now begin a series of chapters on Evagrius’ psychology:

On the one hand, the body of the soul preserves the image (eikona) of a house; on the other
hand, the senses have the nature (logos) of windows, through which the mind (nous),
peeping out, sees the sensible things (IV, 68—Greek fragment). This is a Platonic notion of
the relation between soul and body, here extended to a remark concerning the mind (nous)
and sense-perception. The soul inhabits the body as a house and the mind (nous) regards the
world outside the house as through the house’s windows. Although the mind (nous) has
descended to being a soul, it is still the mind (nous) that is the agent of sense-perception.

The mind (nous), according to the word of Solomon, is joined with the heart; and the light
which appears to it is considered to come from the sensible head (VI, 87). This is important
for understanding Evagrius’ ascetical psychology. In many places in the ancient world, the
seat of the person was considered to be the heart; here, Evagrius is placing the mind (nous)
of man in the heart. The importance of this for the Evagrian ascetical system is that the heart
is also the seat of the irascible part (thumos). We are struck by Evagrius’ notion that the light
that comes to the mind (nous), itself located in the heart, comes from the head. We believe
that Evagrius is referring to the light of God in prayer, not to a natural light of cognition such
as we will find, in Chapter IV of this work, in St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of cognition. If our
interpretation be correct, we do not see how that light could be seen by Evagrius as coming
from the head.

It appears that Evagrius himself had a question about the relation of the light of God seen in
prayer to the natural light of the mind (nous); this can be seen in this passage:

Concerning this very light, then, the servant of God Ammonius and I wished to learn whence it is, and
we asked the saintly John of Thebaïd if indeed the nature of the mind (nous) is bright with light and if
those [who pray] emit the light from the mind (nous), or if something else appears, illuminating it. He,
then, replied, saying that there is no man able to discern this, but that neither, again, is it possible
without the grace of God that the mind (nous) be enlightened in prayer, having been set free from the

many terrible enemies applying themselves to its destruction. [1]

Seen in the light of this passage, Evagrius’ remark seems to be an allusion to a commonly-
held opinion of his time. Even so, the formulation seems unusual.
There is nothing which might be in power in the soul and which could be able to leave it in
act and exist separately; indeed, the soul is naturally made to be in the body (I, 47). This is an
important chapter for Evagrian psychology. There is no faculty or power of the soul which
might be able to exist in act outside the soul. Moreover, the soul is naturally made to be in a
body. However, we have already seen that the soul is itself bodiless, and that its faculties are
in no wise the powers of a sensible, material object, so that while the soul is naturally made
to be in the body, it is just as naturally completely different from the body: All those
attributes which are applied to bodies also apply to those bodies by which they are
engendered, but none of those attributes is attached to the soul (I, 48).

Just as our body, while it has been engendered by our parents, cannot in its turn engender
them, so also the soul, which is engendered by God, cannot in return give him gnosis.
Indeed, ‘What will I give to the Lord in return for all the gifts that he has made to me?’ (Ps.
115, 3.) (III, 89.) This chapter seems to require no explanation.

By comparison, we are one thing and another thing is that which is in us, and another thing
that in which we are; but all together they are that in which we are and ‘that in which’ is ‘that
in which we are’ (I, 6). This is one of a number of deliberately obscure chapters. We have
placed it here to give a proper proportion to Evagrius’ anthropology. Any interpretation that
we would give would be conjectural. It would appear, however, that ‘that which is in us’ is the
mind (nous); ‘that in which we are’ is the body; and that which we are is the ensouled and
incarnated mind (nous).

The sense and the organ of sense are not the same, neither the sensitive. For the sense is the
power according to which we have the custom to apprehend materials; the organ of sense is
the tool (organon) in which the sense is seated; and the sensitive is the animal (zoon) which
possesses the senses. The sensible is that which has the nature to fall under the senses. [To
here: following the Greek fragment.] But this is not the case of the mind (nous), for it is
deprived of one of the four things just referred to (I, 36). This appears to be the organ of
sense, since the mind (nous) is bodiless.

The mind (nous) discerns the sense-perception not insofar as sensible, but insofar as sense-
perception; and the sense-perception discerns the sensible things not insofar as objects but
insofar as sensible objects (V, 58). This and the following chapters are obscure but important
statements of Evagrian psychology. In the present chapter we learn that the mind (nous)
discerns the sense-perception it receives by means the sense organs, not as something that is
perceptible but as pure sense-perception. In other words, the mind (nous) does not look at
the sense-perception it has of an object; it has the sense-perception of the object. The second
clause asserts that the sense-perception that the mind (nous) receives discerns the object not
as object but as sensible object: When I look at a table, my mind (nous) does not look at my
sense-perception of the table; it has the sense-perception of the table. Moreover, that sense-
perception is a sense-perception of the table as sensible object, not a sense-perception of the
table as ‘table-in-itself’: I perceive the sensible attributes of the table, not the ontological
reality of the table. We will see immediately below why Evagrius says this.

Sense-perception does not discern sense-perception; but it only discerns the organs of sense,
not insofar as organs of sense, but insofar as sensible. The mind (nous) discerns sense-
perception insofar as sense-perception and the organs of sense insofar as organs of sense (V,
59). Sense-perception is directed towards a sensible object, not towards sense-perception;
moreover, sense-perception makes use of the sense organ: it only captures the sense organ
insofar as the sense organ itself can be perceived: this is the meaning of the first sentence.
The sense of the second sentence is that the mind (nous) as agent discerns sense-perception
as sense-perception: sense-perception is whatever it is, and it is neither a sense organ nor a
sensible object. Moreover, Evagrius says, the mind (nous) discerns the organ of sense as
organ of sense: the relation between mind (nous) and organ of sense is a specific relation
that has to do with the use by the mind (nous), the agent, of the organ of sense as a tool in
sense-perception.

The objects such as they are naturally, either the pure mind (nous) sees or the word of the
sages makes known. But he who is deprived of the two comes in this to the inculpation of the
Author (V, 90). We can now see why Evagrius insisted above that by means of sense-
perception the mind (nous) only discerns the object as sensible object. For, according to
Evagrius, to discern the object truly, as it naturally is, the mind (nous) must be pure. We
think that Evagrius is here referring to second natural contemplation, although the passage
applies equally well to all phases of natural contemplation: the pure mind (nous) sees the
object clearly because it sees spiritually, not sensibly, the intelligible reason (logos) of the
object, that which is the object’s essence according to the wisdom of God expressed in
creation.
However, in Chapter 40 of the Gnostic, Evagrius makes an important qualification to this
doctrine: there is not just one reason (logos) of an object, but many, in proportion to the
condition of him who is making the contemplation. Moreover, only the angels attain to the
true reasons (logoi) of objects, although not even they attain to the ‘first’ reason (logos),
which according to Evagrius only the Christ possesses. Presumably, this first reason (logos)
that the Evagrian Christ has is the one with which he made the object when he made it by
means of the second natural contemplation. In the case of the first natural contemplation,
the object is intelligible, for example an angel. Despite this, the pure mind (nous) sees it
truly. Recall that Adam in Paradise saw the animals as they were and was thus able to give
them names.

Evagrius makes a second qualification to this doctrine in Scholia on Ecclesiastes 68:

68 The man brings the things forth to the heart, inclining towards their research; after that, then, the
heart knows the things. And this is the: ‘I surrounded, and my heart, for the sake of knowing.’ For he
also surrounds the thing who brings it forth to the heart by means of the examination, and, again, the
heart knows it. However, this must be known, that not all things that the man surrounds the heart also

knows. For we examine many things but we know few [of them]. [2]

What Evagrius means here is that the mind (nous) turns its intuitive faculties—its spiritual
senses—to an intelligible object and thus ‘surrounds it’ for the sake of examining it. Of
course, this examination is intuitive, not ratiocinative. But, Evagrius says, the man may not
know the thing that he has surrounded with his mind (nous) for the sake of examination: he
may not succeed in cognizing intuitively the reason (logos) of the created object. The heart is
here to be understood as the seat of the mind (nous).

To return to the chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica under consideration, as for ‘the word of
the sages’, Evagrius seldom refers to sages, and then not in a flattering way. We do not think,
however, that here Evagrius is being ironic—we do not find irony in the works of Evagrius
that we have read—so he must be referring to the gnostic, to him who in the Evagrian system
can teach. ‘The word of the sages’ makes known the object because, seeing the object truly,
the sage speaks truly. But, says Evagrius, he who has neither the second natural
contemplation nor the teaching of the gnostic comes through ignorance to condemn the
Creator.
 Chapter III -- 32

Being formed in the womb, we live the live of plants; being born, the life of animals;
becoming adults, the life of angels or the life of demons. The cause of the first life is the
ensouled substance; of the second, the senses; of the third, that we are receptive of virtue or
vice (III, 76—Greek fragment as emended). This chapter is a brief presentation of the
Aristotelian schema of the vegetative and animal and human souls that we have already met
with in Chapter II of this work, in the dialogue between St Macrina and St Gregory of Nyssa,
and that we will meet with again in Section 12, below, when we discuss another work of St
Gregory. What is interesting here is Evagrius’ assertion that the fœtus in the womb exercises
only the vegetative soul and that the infant or child without reason exercises only the animal
soul—or, better to say, the faculties of the human soul that correspond in their nature to the
vegetative and animal souls. However, Evagrius says, when we become adults, we live either
an angelic life of virtue or a demonic life of vice. Recall that Evagrius has already said that if
the mind (nous) proceeds on the road of the body, then it will fall on the demons. The sense
is the same. That we are susceptible of virtue or vice is due in the Evagrian system to our
having a reasonable nature, a mind (nous). This is one of the many places in his
anthropology where Evagrius shows his Cappadocian roots.[1]

Those who have ‘participated in the flesh and blood’ (Heb. 2, 14) are ‘the children’; for
whoever is young is neither good nor bad. It is therefore right that it is said that men are
intermediate between angels and demons (IV, 13). We here see men treated as children; we
also see a clear statement that men are intermediate between angels and demons, although
the doctrine of mobility among the three orders is not here stated, nor the doctrine of moral
choice of the chapter just presented.

The angels and demons draw near to our world; but we do not draw near to their worlds.
Indeed, we cannot make the angels approach closer to God, nor do we dream of defiling
more the demons (III, 78). That this chapter is important for Evagrian ascetical psychology
can be seen from the fact that Evagrius himself quotes it in Chapter 19 of On the Thoughts,
the very detailed treatise on ascetical psychology that we will analyse in Volume II.

Whoever is become susceptible of the gnosis of God and who honours ignorance more than
this gnosis is said to be bad. For there is not a corporeal nature capable of gnosis. It is not
appropriate therefore that any body might be said to be bad (III, 53). This chapter contains
several points that Evagrius insists on. First is his definition of ‘bad’. Those who are naturally
capable of the gnosis of God are the minds (noes). Therefore, that mind (nous) is bad which
honours ignorance more than this gnosis, which turns towards ignorance, in whatever body
and world it finds itself, rather than towards gnosis. Moreover, as we have already seen, the
bodily, corporeal, sensible or material nature is not capable of gnosis: try as I might, I cannot
make my computer able to know God. Therefore my computer can never be bad.

The wealth of the soul is gnosis, and its poverty, ignorance; but if ignorance is the privation
of gnosis, then wealth is prior to poverty and the health of the soul prior to its illness (II, 8).
This seems clear enough. It is based on the Aristotelian idea of the bad’s being a privation of
the good. But if B is a privation of A, then A is prior to B: something that exists is prior to its
privation. That the health of the soul (psuche) is prior to its illness has to do with the state,
prior to the Movement, of the mind (nous) which became that soul (psuche). When the mind
(nous) becomes a soul (psuche), it enters into the soul state and thence into the state of men
in a body, unless it becomes a demon because of its further negligence in the soul state. It is
curious that this chapter refers to the soul (psuche) and not directly to the mind (nous). For,
as we have already seen, in Evagrian discourse, one set of things is to be said about the soul
(psuche) and another set of things is to be said about the mind (nous).

Just as light and darkness are accidents of the air, so virtue and vice, and gnosis and
ignorance are united to the reasonable soul (I, 59). This is a restatement of the difference
between sensible objects and reasonable beings, here applied to the soul (psuche).

Among the goods and evils which are considered as without necessity, some are found in the
interior of the soul and others outside it; but it is not possible that things which are said
naturally to be evils might be outside it (I, 21). Virtue and vice, gnosis and ignorance are
things—predicates or attributes—that have to do with the reasonable and not the corporeal,
or sensible, nature. That is why they cannot exist outside the soul, although, patently, they
can exist in other minds (noes) which are embodied not in human souls and bodies but in
angelic or demonic bodies. The difference between the goods and evils that are without
necessity and the things that are natural evils seems to be this: an object may be in a corrupt
state, or it may be inappropriate to one or another use that a man wants to make of it—these
are examples of evils which are without necessity—; but a natural evil—vice—can refer only
to a reasonable being, not to a sensible object.

When we were produced in the beginning, the seeds of the virtues were found naturally in us,
but not at all the seeds of vice. For we do not, if we are receptive of something, at all events
have the power of this thing—since also potentially able not to be, we do not have the power
of the non-existent, if, indeed, powers are qualities whereas the non-existent is not a quality
(I, 39—for the second sentence, following the Greek of On the Thoughts). The importance of
this chapter can be seen in the fact that Evagrius himself quotes the second sentence in
Chapter 31 of On the Thoughts. The sense is that from our genesis before the Movement as
minds (noes), we have had the seeds of the virtues in us but not the seeds of the vices. There
is no eternal principle of evil. This is necessary for Evagrius to emphasize in view of his
doctrine of the Restoration, when all the minds (noes) will return to the contemplation of the
Unity. The second sentence is Evagrius’ proof that we can be capable of something—vice—
without the power or potentiality of that something being in us absolutely—without our
having an intrinsic disposition to evil because of an eternal principle or because God created
the minds (noes) bad. The proof, Evagrius says, is the fact that we can cease to exist—by
suicide, say, or even by a natural death—but for all that, the power of non-existence does not
exist in us absolutely. It exists only in potential. Moreover, Evagrius says, any power which
we might have in us is an attribute whereas non-existence is not an attribute.

For there was a time when there was not vice and there will be a time when there will not be
vice. There was not a time when there was not virtue nor will there be a time when there will
not be virtue. For the seeds of the virtues are indelible. And that rich man in the Gospels
persuades me who, having been condemned to Hades, felt mercy for his brothers (cf. Luke
16, 19–31). To show mercy is the most beautiful seed of virtue. (I, 40—Greek text of On the
Thoughts as emended). This chapter also is quoted in Chapter 31 of On the Thoughts. It is an
elaboration of the thought contained in the previous chapter, and it is similar to a passage in
Peri Archon.[2] Evil—vice—did not exist before the Movement and it will not exist in the
Restoration. However, there was not a time when virtue did not exist—it existed from the
moment of the genesis of the minds (noes) in a single act of God, by means of the seeds of
virtues that, it appears, were then sown in the minds (noes) by the Holy Spirit—and there
will not be a time when virtue will not exist. Elsewhere, however, Evagrius asserts that virtue
is something that is properly spoken of in relation to modes, that is, in relation to the
contingent life in a body and world that each mind (nous) took up after the Movement.
Hence, for Evagrius to be taken in a self-consistent way, we must understand that although
virtue always has existed and always will, it really only is spoken of in relation to the worlds
which were created after the First Judgement and which will all be destroyed in the
Restoration. Going on, Evagrius says that the seeds of the virtues are indestructible. Evagrius
then uses the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man from the Gospel of Luke to explain: even
the rich man condemned to Hades on account of his vice asked Abraham to send someone to
warn his brothers what would befall them if they did not mend their ways.[3]

If death is second by reference to life, and sickness second by reference to health, it is evident
that vice is second by reference to virtue. Indeed, the death and the sickness of the soul are
vice, and virtue is also more ancient that mediateness (I, 41). We do not know what
‘mediateness’ really is here. We used this rather rare English word to translate a
corresponding word (médiété) in the French translation of the Kephalaia Gnostica, which
French word has in some uses the senses of ‘proportionality’ or ‘the just mean’. Here, it
seems to refer to the condition of the worlds which were created by the Evagrian Christ after
the Movement, to the condition of an object’s being intermediate between two other objects.
For the object before us is subsequent to the object from which it was generated according to
the operation of nature, and it is prior to the object which it will itself become when, as that
object, it will experience corruption, decay or destruction. This is Aristotelian. Hence all
natural sensible things are in a continuous process of generation and corruption, so that one
can speak of a principle of mediateness, or intermediateness, a state of being transitional
between one object or state and another. This of course is our conjecture what Evagrius must
have had in mind when he wrote the word that we have rendered as ‘mediateness’. The rest
of the chapter should be clear from the immediately preceding one.

The virtues are said to be before us, at the side where we possess senses, but behind us the
bad actions, on the side where we do not possess any sense-perception. It is commanded us,
in fact, to ‘flee fornication’ (1 Cor. 6, 18) and to ‘pursue hospitality’ (Rom. 12, 13) (I, 66). This
does not seem to require explanation. It might be remarked that for all his heterodoxy,
Evagrius was a very moral man and very insistent on the role of virtue in the ascetical life.

Just as our Saviour, by the sensible healing of the paralytic (cf. Matt. 9, 2–7; etc.), has
illumined us concerning the intelligible healing, and by that which is manifest has confirmed
that which is hidden, so also by the sensible departure of the sons of Israel, he has shown us
the departure from vice and ignorance (VI, 64). It is worthwhile to recall the episode in the
Gospel. The paralytic is let down by his friends from the roof, before Christ. Seeing their
faith, Christ says to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’ The scribes and Pharisees are
scandalized: ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ Knowing their thoughts, Christ says: ‘So
that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you,
the paralytic: take up your bed and go.’ The intelligible healing is represented, for Evagrius,
by the forgiveness of sins. The healing of the physical ailment follows Christ’s statement, ‘So
that you, the scribes and Pharisees, might know that the Son has authority to forgive sins…,’
and so demonstrates visibly the intelligible power of the Christ to forgive sins. ‘For which is
easier to say: your sins are forgiven, or take up your bed and go?’ Evagrius then uses this
passage to give an allegorical interpretation to Exodus: the sensible departure of the sons of
Israel from the sensible Egypt is a type of the departure by praktike from the intelligible
Egypt, which symbolizes the demons and the passions excited by them.

The irascible part (thumos) of the soul is joined with the heart where its mind (nous) is also;
and its desiring part (epithumia) is joined with flesh and blood, if it is necessary for us ‘to
remove from the heart anger and from the flesh, vice’ (Eccl. 11, 10) (VI, 84). This is a
statement in Evagrian psychology. The irascible part of the soul (thumos)—which we take to
include all the moral passions that do not pertain to the desiring part of the soul [4]—is
joined to the heart, where the mind (nous) is seated. The desiring part of the soul
(epithumia) is related to flesh and blood, to the body. St Gregory of Nyssa takes the position
in On the Making of Man,[5] that the mind (nous) is not located in any one part of the body.
We will discuss the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) in detail in
Volume II. We will see in Chapter IV, below, that St Thomas Aquinas takes the position that
all the passions—under the definition he gives to the passions, surely—have a bodily
substrate.

[1] In the final sentence of this chapter, the French rendition of the Syriac (see Appendix 2 of Volume II) has ‘animated
nature’ instead of ‘ensouled substance’. If that is the correct reading, it to be taken as referring to the Aristotelian
vegetative soul, not to the Aristotelian animal soul: in Aristotle, characteristic of the animal soul is sense-perception,
which is not yet in issue. However, the Greek fragment has ‘ensouled substance’, which could very well refer to the male
sperm instead of to the vegetative soul. This would agree with the sense of St Gregory of Nyssa in a similar passage that
we discuss in Section 12, below.
 Chapter III -- 33

If all the powers which we and the beasts have in common pertain to the corporeal nature,
then it is evident that the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) do not
appear to have been created with the reasonable nature before the Movement (VI, 85). This
is a very important chapter for Evagrius’ anthropology because in the two works we shall
analyse in Volume II there is something of an ambiguity in Evagrius’ terminology for the
passions. We will find then that the passions are connected to the irascible part (thumos) or
to the desiring part (epithumia). Here we clearly find the doctrine—which we also found in
Chapter II of this work to be espoused by St Macrina, as reported by her brother, St Gregory
of Nyssa—that the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) are parts of the
animal nature that man has received with sense-perception. In St Macrina, this reception has
to do with the creation of man; in Evagrius, it has to do with the granting to certain minds
(noes) of the rank of praktike soul (psuche), followed by that soul’s (psuche’s) descent into a
body. Of course, in Evagrius, this entails the whole apparatus of his cosmology that we have
already discussed, whereas in St Macrina, the reception of the animal soul is positioned in
Paradise as part of the creation of man.

In Chapter 18 of On the Thoughts, Evagrius separates the passions into two categories: the
passions of man as irrational animal—gluttony, fornication and anger—and the passions of
man as man—these include vainglory, pride, envy and condemnation. For reasons we discuss
in Section 13, below, and in Volume II in our commentary on Chapter 18 of On the Thoughts,
the category of the passions of man as man creates a problem: in our view, they cannot be
passions of the mind (nous), and they are excluded from the irascible part (thumos) and the
desiring part (epithumia), which pertain in the typology being discussed to the animal
passions of man. Where then do they fit? Are they passions that the mind (nous) received
when it became a soul (psuche) but before it took on a human body? Or has Evagrius
contradicted himself?

The answer, based on Peri Archon, seems to be that Evagrius is mixing two models of human
psychology, one Cappadocian and the other based on Origen. For we find in Peri Archon that
Origen rejects the tripartite soul.[1] Moreover, Origen’s development in Peri Archon of
human psychology, based on the notion that the mind (nous) descends to become a soul and
then to inhabit a body, is quite consistent with the distinction that Evagrius draws in Chapter
18 of On the Thoughts.

We will discuss this further in Section 13, below.

Chapter III -- 34

If all vice has the nature to come from the rational part (logistikon), from the desire
(epithumia) or from the irascible part (thumikon), and it is possible to use these powers
either well or ill, then clearly the vices occur to us from the use of these parts. If this is so,
then, nothing of the things which have come to be from God is evil (III, 59—Greek fragment).
This should be clear. In fact, it is much the same thing that in Chapter II of the present work
we found St Macrina to be saying. It is a man’s free choice and use of the powers of the soul
(psuche) that determine whether their use is good or bad. With respect to the questions
posed in the previous paragraphs, we see that, here at least, Evagrius restricts himself to a
tripartite division of the soul, which would imply that every moral passion belongs either to
the irascible part (thumos) or to the desiring part (epithumia), since only intellectual vices
can belong to the rational part or mind (nous),[1] as we see in the following chapter:

To the mind (nous) are united gnosis and ignorance; the desiring part (epithumia) is
receptive of chastity and lust; and to the irascible part (thumos) love and hate have the
custom to occur. The first accompanies those who are first, and the second those who are
second (I, 84). These are very important statements in ascetical psychology, and we shall
return to them in Volume II. Here we present them as part of Evagrius’ anthropology. We are
not sure what Evagrius means by the ‘first’ and the ‘second’. Perhaps he means that virtue is
related to the angels, and vice to the demons. Note that here Evagrius has assigned love to
what we ourselves consider to be its natural location, the irascible part (thumos), and not to
the desiring part (epithumia). We will see in Volume II that, perhaps by oversight, Evagrius,
following a Peripatetic prototype treatise on the virtues, in Chapter 89 of the Treatise on the
Practical Life assigns love to the desiring part (epithumia). It is also worth remarking that,
here, Evagrius clearly considers that the irascible part (thumos) is not merely the seat of the
irrational passion of anger, but also the seat of spiritual charity; that is the meaning here of
‘love’. And it is spiritual charity that defeats vainglory, pride, envy and condemnation, the
passions of man as man the Evagrius lists in Chapter 18 of On the Thoughts; hence, it cannot
be considered that the irascible part is foreign to the passions—and therefore, necessarily, to
the virtues—of man taken as man.

The irascible part (thumos), when it is disturbed, blinds the seer, whereas the desire
(epithumia), when it is set in motion irrationally, hides the objects which are seen (V, 27—
Greek fragment). This seems clear enough. We say that so-and-so was ‘blind with rage’, and
the notion that desire can be moved irrationally (or, bestially) is a commonplace. That desire
might hide visible objects when moved irrationally seems, however, to be Evagrius’ own
contribution to psychology, for we are not otherwise aware of such an opinion. However,
what he most likely means is that desire (epithumia) when it is irrationally excited blocks the
contemplation of intelligibles. How this differs from being blinded by a disturbed temper
(thumos) is intuitively obvious but not clear from Evagrius’ words.

Spiritual gnosis cleanses the mind (nous); love (agape) heals the irascible part (thumos);
and continence stems flowing desire (epithumia). [To here: following the Greek fragment.]
And the cause of the first is the second, and that of the second, the third (III, 35). This
chapter provides the whole Evagrian ascetical system in a nutshell. The healing of the
desiring part (epithumia) and the irascible part (thumos)—in that order!—is exactly what
praktike is. The healing of the mind (nous) by gnosis is precisely the task that one begins
when one has attained the goal of praktike, dispassion (apatheia). For once one has attained
to dispassion (apatheia), the culmination of the practical life (praktike), then one starts on
the road of natural contemplation, which is the healing of the mind (nous) by gnosis; and
one completes this healing in Theology, which is the gnosis of God.

The resurrection of the soul is the return from the order of passionateness to the
dispassionate state (V, 22). We can now see what this means. The mind (nous) in becoming a
soul (psuche) has descended to the rank of praktike. This means that its task precisely is to
return to the dispassionate state from the order of passionateness. That is the soteriological
program of return to God in the upward mystical ascent that is appropriate to a mind (nous)
that has been judged worthy of descent to the rank of praktike. But praktike is precisely the
task of returning the desiring part (epithumia) from lust to chastity and, after that, the
irascible part (thumos) from anger to love. In other words, finding itself a man, the mind
(nous) has before it the task of returning from the order of passionateness to the
dispassionate state, to dispassion (apatheia). But the order of passionateness is precisely the
state of having the desiring part (epithumia) operating contrary to nature and the irascible
part (thumos) operating contrary to nature. And dispassion (apatheia) is precisely the
condition of having the desiring part (epithumia) operating according to nature and the
irascible part (thumos) operating according to nature. As we have seen, above, the passage of
the desiring part (epithumia) from a condition contrary to nature to a condition according to
nature is precisely the passage from lust to chastity. Having accomplished that, Evagrius
says, the ascetic can then work on the passage of the irascible part (thumos) from a condition
contrary to nature to a condition according to nature: this is precisely the passage of the
irascible part (thumos) from hatred to spiritual love. When the ascetic has accomplished
that, then he has reached dispassion (apatheia), the resurrection of the soul, and he can start
to work on the resurrection of the mind (nous):

The resurrection of the mind (nous) is the passage from ignorance to true gnosis (V, 25).
When the ascetic has attained to the resurrection of the soul (psuche), dispassion (apatheia),
then he can begin to work on the resurrection of his mind (nous), which is the passage from
ignorance to true gnosis. This is accomplished in contemplation. This is the Evagrian
soteriological program for minds (noes) that have been judged worthy of relegation to the
rank of praktike, once they have by ascesis returned from the order of passionateness to the
order of dispassion (apatheia). But those minds (noes)—ignoring here the matter of the
order of souls—are precisely men. We will discuss these topics in depth in Volume II, but let
us here add several more chapters of Evagrius on the topic:

Although the transformations are numerous, we have received the gnosis of four only. The
first is the passage from vice to virtue; the second is that from dispassion to the second
natural contemplation; the third is the passage from the second natural contemplation to the
gnosis that concerns the angels; and the fourth is the passage from all to the gnosis of the
Holy Trinity (II, 4). This chapter provides a summary of the soteriological program for minds
(noes) that have descended to the rank of praktike. The first transformation, the passage
from moral vice to moral virtue, is the practical life (praktike). The passage from moral vice
to moral virtue might be taken to be a formal definition of praktike. Moreover, we have just
seen that this passage from moral vice to moral virtue has a specific content: it is, first, the
return of the desiring part (epithumia) of the soul from lust to chastity, and, then, building
on that, the return of the irascible part (thumos) of the soul from anger to love. When that
has been accomplished, then one has accomplished the first transformation, and, to use the
terminology of the chapters previously presented, one has attained to dispassion (apatheia),
the resurrection of the soul. There was much dispute in Evagrius’ day about what he meant
by dispassion (apatheia), and about whether it was a legitimate Christian concept, and there
is much dispute even today about what he meant. Here we have a clear statement of the
content of the his concept of dispassion (apatheia): it is the result of the first transformation,
the passage from moral vice to moral virtue. Moreover, Evagrius sees this as one
transformation of four, these four transformations, as far as we have been able to understand
the Kephalaia Gnostica, to be taken in a serial temporal order, and not as four
transformations which occur simultaneously and partially until death of the ascetic.
Moreover, this whole schema requires for its proper comprehension, the realization that in
Evagrius the soul (psuche) and the mind (nous) are not the same thing. Dispassion
(apatheia) heals the soul. But that is not for Evagrius the end of the human soteriological
program. There are then three other transformations that heal the mind (nous).

The next transformation, the one that presupposes that one has healed the soul (psuche) and
attained to dispassion (apatheia), is the transformation from dispassion (apatheia) to the
second natural contemplation. The second natural contemplation is the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of sensible objects, and we have already learned that it is a characteristic of
the imperfect mind (nous). However, this transformation does mark the transition in
Evagrius from work on the soul (psuche) to work on the mind (nous).

The next transformation is the passage from the second natural contemplation to the first
natural contemplation, the contemplation of the bodiless or reasonable powers, the angels.
We have already seen that St Isaac the Syrian interprets this transformation as the passage
from contemplation involving the use of the senses to contemplation which no longer
involves their use. In the Ladder of Divine Ascent, St John of Sinai presents such a
contemplation.[2]

There are in the Kephalaia Gnostica several contemplative stages related to the
contemplation of angels that are not clearly defined. For example, Evagrius refers to the
difference between contemplating an angel and contemplating the reason (logos) of the
angel. Moreover, he refers to the contemplation of the worlds—evidently all the various
worlds (angelic and perhaps otherwise) which have been created after the Movement—and to
the contemplation of intelligibles. These intelligibles are never explained, but they seem to be
the Platonic forms. Of course, it is possible that by the contemplation of intelligibles,
Evagrius is merely referring to the contemplation of angels and their reasons (logoi).

The final transformation is the passage from the first natural contemplation—‘from all’—to
the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. It is the ‘naked mind (nous)’ that contemplates the
Holy Trinity. Recall, however, that St Isaac the Syrian interprets Evagrius in such a way that
the mind (nous) becomes naked when it divests itself of the senses in passing from the
second natural contemplation to the first natural contemplation. We have ourselves
suggested that eschatologically the final vestment or garment of the mind (nous) is the soul
(psuche) itself.

What would Evagrius mean by the divestiture of the soul? On the eschatological plane, this is
easy to understand: as the mind (nous) makes its upward mystical ascent through the
various worlds after death, it is, according to its merit, successively incarnated into various
angelic worlds, and then, when it is ready to leave the angelic worlds for the ‘first world’ from
which it can nakedly contemplate the Unity, it leaves its soul behind, that soul that had been
given to it when it was relegated to the rank of praktike. This is hypothetical, since Evagrius
never explains with such clarity the upward ascent after death but before the General
Resurrection and the Restoration. However, it is quite consistent with the passage of Peri
Archon that we quoted at the beginning of this section, on the relation between mind and
soul.

After the General Resurrection, the doctrine of Evagrius is clear: the minds (noes), having
been granted dispassion (apatheia) in the Resurrection, first receive a spiritual body as a tool
for the ascent of gnosis, and then later divest themselves of that spiritual body and enter into
the henad of minds (noes) which nakedly contemplate the Unity. It is not clear however,
what relation the spiritual body has to the mind (nous) and to the soul (psuche). This point is
as far as we know never discussed either by Evagrius or by Origen.

But what might this mean for the ascetic? We have already remarked on the structural
parallel in Evagrius between the eschatological mystical ascent and the ascetical mystical
ascent. We think that what is involved—since insofar as the ascetic is in the flesh he, as far as
we know, must in the Evagrian system have a soul (psuche), and Evagrius emphatically
condemns suicide—is the purification of the ascetic to such an extent that the mind (nous) of
the ascetic possesses the soul (psuche) in power:

Just as the fire in power possesses its body, so also the mind (nous) in power will possess the
soul, when it will be entirely mixed with the light of the Holy Trinity (II, 29). With the
ascetic’s attainment to dispassion (apatheia), the soul (psuche) has already been separated
from, or rendered autonomous of, the body.[3]

[1] We take logistikon and nous to be synonymous here.

Chapter III -- 35

We now look at another Evagrian typology of the mystical ascent:

The first renunciation is the abandonment of objects of the world, which is produced by the
will for the gnosis of God (I, 78).

The second renunciation is the abandonment of vice, which is produced by the grace of God
and by the effort of man (I, 79).

The third renunciation is the separation from ignorance, which is naturally made to become
manifest to men in proportion to those men’s conditions (I, 80).

These three renunciations are important because they are quoted in one form or another by
both St John of Sinai, in his Ladder of Divine Ascent,[1] and St John Cassian (?–435), in his
Conferences.[2] They can be seen to correspond to the four transformations that we have
just discussed. The first renunciation is that which corresponds to the beginning of the
ascetical life; it is preliminary to praktike. The second renunciation is precisely praktike, the
first transformation. The third renunciation spans the final three transformations; it refers to
the stages of second natural contemplation, first natural contemplation and the
contemplation of the Holy Trinity.
In Volume II, we will learn that in the Treatise on the Practical Life, Evagrius calls the stages
of the mystical life by the names of praktike, natural contemplation and Theology. Praktike,
which in Volume II we have consistently translated ‘the practical life’, we have just seen to
correspond to the first transformation and the second renunciation. Natural contemplation
is second natural contemplation and first natural contemplation taken together. The second
natural contemplation is the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of sensible objects; it is the
result of the second transformation. The first natural contemplation is the contemplation of
angels, the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of angels, the contemplation of worlds and,
perhaps, the contemplation of intelligibles; it is the result of the third transformation.
Theology is the contemplation of the Holy Trinity or Unity; it is the result of the fourth and
final transformation.

The second nature is the sign of the body and the first nature, the sign of the soul; and the
mind (nous) is the Christ who is united to the gnosis of the Trinity (I, 77). This chapter
appears to establish a correspondence between the stages of contemplation and the body,
soul (psuche) and mind (nous) of man. What it seems to say is this: The second natural
contemplation corresponds to the body of man; the first natural contemplation to the soul
(psuche) of man; and Theology, the contemplation of God, to the mind (nous) of man, in its
turn identified with the Christ.

The second natural contemplation is the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of material
bodies. Hence its correspondence to the body of man, received so that man might live in a
material world.

The first natural contemplation is the contemplation of the angels and their reasons (logoi).
Evagrius does not elsewhere make such a clear identification between the state of the man in
first natural contemplation and the soul (psuche), although, as we have remarked, he does
say that the soul (psuche) of the man who has attained to dispassion (apatheia), the
precondition of natural contemplation, possesses its body in power. Under the identification
that Evagrius here seems to be making, natural contemplation both second and first is the
stage of the soul (psuche).

Theology is the contemplation of God. We know that it is the naked mind (nous) that
contemplates God. Hence, Evagrius here seems to be saying that in passing from the first
natural contemplation to Theology, the ascetic passes from the region of the soul (psuche) to
the region of the mind (nous).[3] However, we have seen St Isaac the Syrian to assert that
the ascetic attains to the state of the naked mind (nous) in passing from second to first
natural contemplation, when he divests himself of the senses.

The connection here of the human mind (nous) with the Christ is that the Christ is a mind
(nous) like all the other minds (noes), the only mind (nous) in the negligence of the
Movement not to falter in its contemplation of the Unity, and that each mind (nous) is to be
united to the gnosis of the Unity just as the Christ already is.

(This interpretation of KG I, 77 requires that we treat ‘second nature’ as corresponding to

‘second natural contemplation’ and ‘first nature’ as corresponding to ‘first natural
contemplation’.[4])

KG I, 77 has certain similarities to the passage in the Letter to Melania that teaches that the
Son and the Holy Spirit are as a divine soul (psuche) to the divine mind (nous) that is the
Father, whereas the human mind (nous) is as a body to that divine soul (i.e. the Son and the
Holy Spirit).[5] However, the extended doctrine of the Letter on the matter is not to be found
in the Kephalaia Gnostica, and this chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica is susceptible of a
‘non-Melanian’ interpretation, the one we have given.

That reasonable soul is sterile which is always learning and never wishing to come into a
deep knowledge (epignosis) of the truth (VI, 62—Greek fragment). This does not require
comment.

If sensible words (logoi) also make known objects in the world to come, it is evident that the
sages of this world will also receive the Kingdom of the Heavens. But if it is the purity of the
mind (nous) which sees, and the word (logos, i.e. reason) appropriate to that purity which
makes known, then the sages of this world are kept at a distance from God (VI, 22). The
Greek word for both ‘word’ and ‘reason’ is logos. Moreover, the Kingdom of the Heavens is
defined in Chapter 2 of Treatise on the Practical Life as dispassion (apatheia) together with
the gnosis that comes from natural contemplation.[6] Hence, this chapter is a statement that
the condition for progress of the mind (nous) in gnosis is purity of mind (nous), not sensible
words: book-learning.

Just as it is not the materials but their qualities that nourish the bodies, thus it is not the
objects but the contemplations that concern them that increase the soul (II, 32—Greek
fragment). This is an extremely important statement of the role of natural contemplation in
the nourishment of the soul (psuche)—or, better, in the nourishment of the mind (nous).
Moreover it is a reiteration of the Evagrian doctrine that the reason (logos) of a sensible
object is not the same thing as the sensible object whose reason (logos) is being
contemplated. As Evagrius states elsewhere, every contemplation except the contemplation
of the Holy Trinity has an underlying object. Hence, Evagrius seems to be saying, what
nourishes the soul or mind is the contemplation itself, not the underlying object. We have
presented this passage as referring to all phases of natural contemplation, but Evagrius
possibly intends only second natural contemplation: ‘object’ is ambiguous and could be
either a material object only (hence, second natural contemplation), or also even an
intelligible object such as an angel (hence, all phases of natural contemplation).

The contemplation of this world is double: one manifest and gross, the other intelligible and
spiritual. The impious and the demons draw near to the first contemplation, and to the
second the just and the angels of God. And just as, more than the just, the angels know the
spiritual contemplation, so, more than the impious, the demons know the gross
contemplation which, it is thought, they also give to certain ones who belong to them; and we
have learned from the Divine Book that the holy angels do that also (VI, 2).

Those who apply themselves now to draw near to gnosis possess in common the water and
the perfumed oil; but in distinction and in abundance, men possess the oil (III, 43). The
water is an allusion to the waters of Baptism; and the perfumed oil, to the oil used for the
Mystery of Chrismation, the Mystery of the reception of the Holy Spirit.[7] However, we do
not understand what Evagrius wants to say here.

All those who are baptized in water receive the delightful odour; but he who baptizes is he
who has the perfumed oil (III, 85). The delightful odour is the grace or presence (‘odour’) of
the Holy Spirit, and the perfumed oil is the Holy Spirit itself, which Christ himself has, the
Baptizer of Christians. But Evagrius’ deeper meaning is unclear to us. This chapter is very
similar to a passage in Peri Archon.[8]

Blessed is he who loves nothing of the second natural contemplation if it is not the
contemplation (III, 86).

Blessed is he who hates nothing of the first contemplation of natures if it is not their vice (III,
87).

Blessed is he who has come to the unsurpassable gnosis (III, 88). These three beatitudes are
intrinsic to the Evagrian system of contemplation.

Men live three lives: the first, the second and the third. Those who belong to the first nature
receive the first and second lives; but those who participate in the second nature receive the
third life. And it is said that the first life proceeds from that which is, but that the second and
third lives proceed from that which is not (II, 31). We are not sure what this means.

If the whole world of men is a world of children, one day they will arrive at the age of
adulthood which pertains to the righteous and the impious (IV, 15). This has to do with the
Evagrian eschatology, although it is unclear just which phase he has in mind. Here he seems
to mean not the Restoration wherein all will return to the contemplation of the Unity, but the
intermediate judgement after death that will assign anew to men, bodies and worlds
according to their works, in the same sense as the following chapter:

Among men, some will hold festival with the angels, others will be mixed with the flock of
demons, and others will be tormented with the defiled men (V, 9).

Those who are now under the earth will lead to an immoderate vice those who will now have
done terrestrial things, the wretches! (III, 79.) This is a statement that men who behave
viciously in this life will go to the demons in the next life, where their condition will be
demonic. It might also be construed to mean that men who behave in this life in a worldly
fashion, while still in this life will be led by the demons to an immoderate vice, to those men’s
own misfortune and condemnation in the next life.
[3] The ascetic’s own mind (nous). There is no doctrine in Evagrius of a Neoplatonic divine nous.

[7] Corresponding to the Western sacrament of Confirmation, but always, in the Orthodox Church, administered
immediately after Baptism—one week later in Evagrius’ day.

Chapter III -- 36

7 The Evagrian Angelology

It is said that God is there where he acts, and that where he acts the more, there he is present
the more; for he acts the more in natures which are reasonable and holy. Therefore he is
present most of all in the celestial powers (I, 42). The importance of this chapter is for
Evagrius’ theory of the gnosis of God. In the second natural contemplation we know God by
contemplating his wisdom, the reasons (logoi) of existent things. This is an indirect way of
knowing God, for this wisdom, as we have already seen Evagrius to say, is not an essential
wisdom: it is not the nature of God, or God himself. However, the importance of the ascetical
transition from the second natural to the first natural contemplation lies in what Evagrius
says in this chapter. God himself is present in the angels in another way, because he acts the
more in the angelic powers. Hence, the contemplation of the angels is not merely a diversion
for the ascetic in the desert; it is his ascent towards God: he has attained to dispassion
(apatheia), the resurrection of the soul; he has encountered the wisdom of God in the second
natural contemplation; now he will proceed to encounter God in a more direct but still
imperfect way in the contemplation of the angels. Only when he has been yet more purified
will he be able to contemplate God directly in the contemplation of the Holy Trinity or Unity.

It should be remarked that although we here emphasize that wisdom of God is an aspect of
the second natural contemplation, that of the reasons (logoi) of created objects, Evagrius is
clear that the wisdom of God is manifest in all his creatures, including the reasonable
creatures or angels. Indeed, this is apparent from the fact that we can also contemplate the
reasons (logoi) of the angels. However, Evagrius seems to have a somewhat different sense of
the first natural contemplation, the contemplation of the angels themselves. For as this
chapter indicates, God is present in a different way in the angels than he is, say, in a
mountain, a tree or a bird. Evagrius, however, never fully explains the matter.

Among the angels, there is a predominance of nous and of fire; among men, a predominance
of desire and earth; and among the demons, a predominance of thumos and air. It is said
that the third draw near to the second by means of the nostrils and that the first draw near to
the second by means of the mouth (I, 68). This chapter is important. It draws several
distinctions that are important to an understanding of Evagrian ascetical psychology. The
angel has a predominance of mind (nous). What does this mean? We have already seen that
the mind (nous), when it descends to the human condition, to praktike, obtains or becomes
—Evagrius is not clear—a soul (psuche) which, when it incarnates into a human body, has
three parts: mind (nous), the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia).
Using this model of the human soul, Evagrius is analysing what part of the notional human
soul predominates in the angel, the man and the demon. We say ‘notional’ since, as far as we
know, angels, while they are minds (noes) with angelic bodies, do not have souls on the
human pattern. Nor, as far as we know, do demons: we ignore here, for lack of development
of the matter on the part of Evagrius, his doctrine in KG V, 11 that the demons come from the
order of souls just as men do: there is simply not enough information in the Kephalaia
Gnostica to discuss the demons at this level of analysis.

However, the angel has a predominance of mind (nous). This goes to say that angels, if they
have desire or anger at all—Evagrius does not explicitly say that they do not—have them in
some small proportions in relation to their mind (nous), which predominates. This for
Evagrius is a good thing. Men, says Evagrius next, have a predominance of desire. That is,
the major motive of most men is desire. This accords with what Freud had to say 1500 years
after Evagrius. Demons, on the other hand, have a predominance of anger. This is a very
important both for Evagrius’ demonology and for his ascetical psychology, since he insists in
the works that we will analyse in Volume II that the ascetic who harbours anger is in a
demonic state. Evagrius is very insistent on the need for the ascetic to put off all anger and to
acquire meekness, or spiritual love. As for the predominance of one or another material
element, the meaning should be clear. As for the mode of approach to men of angels or
demons, Evagrius takes what he is saying seriously and he says similar things in both the
Treatise on the Practical Life and On the Thoughts. In Chapter 39 of the Treatise on the
Practical Life, he does speak of the spiritual bad odour that demons have, and that might be
related to what he says here of their approach to men by means of the nostrils. However, we
do not know the significance of his assertion that angels approach men by the medium of the
mouth.

The minds (noes) of the heavenly powers are pure and full of gnosis, and their bodies are of
lights which are resplendent over those who draw near to them (III, 5).

The movement of bodies is temporal, but the transformation of the bodiless powers is
timeless (II, 87). Evidently, time is a quality of the sensible creation. Therefore the
transformation of the bodiless powers—Evagrius is not explicit what he means; their own
mystical progress seems to be the sense—would be outside time. We have already seen that
before the Movement and the creation of bodies and worlds, there was no time.

There is nothing among the bodiless powers which might be in power in the bodies; indeed,
our soul is bodiless (I, 45). It is not the bodies of the spiritual powers, but the bodies of the
souls only, which are naturally made to nourish themselves from the world which is related
to them (II, 82). We have already discussed these two chapters. We have repeated them here
merely for the sake of the fullness of Evagrius’ portrait of the angelic powers.

The contemplation of this sensible world has not been given as nourishment to men only but
also to the other reasonable natures (II, 88). We have already explained the central role of
the world of men in the Evagrian cosmology and the fact that the angels nourish themselves
by the second natural contemplation of the things in the world of man. This is a statement of
that doctrine.

The angels see men and the demons; men are deprived of the sight of the angels and
demons; and the demons see men only (VI, 69). This is a statement of the differences among
the natural powers of the three orders of minds (noes).

All those who now possess spiritual bodies reign over the worlds which have been produced,
and those who have been joined to praktike bodies or opposed will exercise the royalty of the
worlds to come (I, 11). This is an important and heterodox statement of Evagrius’
eschatology. Those who possess spiritual, or angelic, bodies are the angelic powers. We have
already seen this. Here Evagrius is saying that the angels rule over the various worlds which
have been produced. Men are those who have been joined to praktike bodies. Note that
nothing is said here about the order of souls. Those who are opposed are the demons. In the
worlds to come men and the demons—who in the Evagrian system will have reformed—will
exercise, evidently as angels, the royalty just as the angels do now. This appears to be prior to
the Restoration, since in the Restoration all the minds (noes) will be without bodies and will
have returned to the naked contemplation of the Unity.

Chapter III -- 37

A holy power is that which has been constituted of the contemplation of beings and of the
incorporeal nature and of the corporeal nature (VI, 17). This is an important if obscure
chapter, for it again tells us that contemplations have the nature of powers or substances.
Here we learn that an angel is constituted by the contemplation of beings—we think that this
means the contemplation of ‘reasonable beings, minds (noes)’—by the contemplation of the
incorporeal nature—this seems to us pleonastic unless it means the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of the angels[1]—and by the contemplation of the corporeal nature—the
second natural contemplation. That an angel would be constituted of these contemplations
implies that an angel naturally engages in these types of contemplation without any difficulty
whatsoever. Note that nothing is said about sense-perception on the part of an angel. That is
an attribute of the corporeal nature only, and, as we have learned, angels, although they
possess angelic bodies, have no connection in their essence with the sensible creation.

The archangel is a reasonable essence to which have been entrusted the reasons (logoi)
concerning providence and the judgement, and those reasons (logoi) that pertain to the
worlds of angels (V, 4). The angel is a reasonable essence to which have been entrusted the
reasons (logoi) concerning providence and the judgement, and those reasons (logoi) that
pertain to the worlds of men (V, 7). These two chapters seem clear enough. The only
ambiguity is this: when Evagrius says ‘those reasons (logoi) which pertain to the worlds…’,
does he mean the reasons (logoi) of providence and the judgement only, or all the reasons
(logoi) that pertain to the worlds in question? We do not know.

The Holy Powers also know the mental representations of all those things of which they have
received the governance; but the governance of those of whom they know the mental
representations has not been confided to them absolutely (II, 30). What this says is that the
angels know many things about those of whom they have the governance, but the governance
they have over them is not absolute. Evidently God himself retains a share in the governance
of the worlds over which are placed the angels. We said ‘many things’ because of an
ambiguity in Evagrius’ expression. Does he mean that the angels know the thoughts of those
over whom they have the governance, or does he simply mean that the angels participate in
the second natural contemplation of the objects in the worlds over which they preside?

The divine powers repel, not those who venerate them, but those who sacrifice to them; and
that we have manifestly learned in Judges from Manoah (cf. Judg. 13, 15–21) (IV, 45). The
French text of the Kephalaia Gnostica has ‘adore’ where we have put ‘venerate’ on the basis
of what we think must have been the underlying Greek of Evagrius.[2] One cannot make too
much here of the use of the word ‘adore’. It would be necessary to see the original Greek to
see whether Evagrius means that it is permissible to worship angels or whether he simply
means it is permissible to venerate them—for their virtue:

We honour the angels not on account of their nature, but on account of their virtue, and we
insult the demons on account of the vice which is in them (V, 47). Both the angels and the
demons are of the same essence: they are minds (noes), just as men are. This doctrine is
necessary for Evagrius in view of his doctrine of the Restoration.

It is not only the holy angels who work with us on our salvation, but also the stars
themselves, if in the days of Barak, from Heaven they made war with Sisara (Judg. 5, 20).
(VI, 88). The doctrine that the stars are intelligences or reasonable beings is one that
Evagrius has taken directly from Origen.[3] It was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical
Synod, in Anathema 3.

‘The stars are superior to one another by the glory’ (1 Cor. 15, 41) and not by their bodies; but
their size, their figures, their distances the one from the other and their courses are diverse.
That some are in the interior of the shadow of the earth and others outside it and others at
the separating limit, teaches us concerning their orders and concerning the governance
which has been confided to them by God (III, 37). This seems perfectly clear, but let us point
out that the visible star is the body of the mind (nous) that is the star. The glory that that star
has is a matter of the glory of the mind (nous) whose body we see at night in the sky, not a
matter of that body. Of course, Evagrius considers that the material out of which the body of
the star is made is something quite fiery.

All of the second natural contemplation bears the sign of the stars; and the stars are those to
whom it has been entrusted to illumine those who are in the night (III, 84). It should be clear
that Evagrius is here not speaking metaphorically of the charge that the stars have to
illumine those who are in the night of ignorance.

The judgement of the angels is the gnosis concerning the illnesses of the soul, which makes
those men who have been wounded ascend to spiritual health (III, 46).

The holy angels instruct certain men by word; they recall others by means of dreams; they
render others chaste by nocturnal terrors, and they make others return to virtue by blows
(VI, 86).

The demons imitate only the colours, the forms and the size; but the holy powers know how
to transform also the nature of the body, in disposing it for the services which are necessary.
And that occurs among the composite beings; but of the incorporeal nature there are not
such mental representations, according to what has been said (V, 18). The demons cannot
transform their own demonic body. They can only imitate the attributes of a body when they
want to appear to men. This appears to be Evagrius’ reflection on the ascetical teaching that
when the demons present themselves they do so by means of fantasy. In other words, there is
nothing real about the apparition of the demon as a lion, as a beautiful woman and so on.
The demons have merely imitated the appearance of the object or animal or person they
present, the sensible attributes that Evagrius lists. The angels on the other hand, if we
understand Evagrius well, are able to transform their own bodies when they appear to men,
so that they have a more ‘substantial’ presence when they appear; they are not mere fantasy.
The last sentence means that what has just been said applies to minds (noes) with angelic or
demonic bodies but not to minds (noes) taken as such. But the sentence is obscure.

By means of the mental representations of exhortation, the holy angels purify us of vice and
render us dispassionate; and by the mental representations of nature and by the divine
reasons (logoi), they liberate us from ignorance and render us sages and gnostics (VI, 35).
This seems to mean that the angels assist the ascetic in the mystical ascent, in both praktike
and contemplation. We find such an idea in the Ladder of Divine Ascent of St John of Sinai,
in the passage in Step 27, ‘Concerning Hesychia’, where St John describes his own converse
with an angel during a contemplation.[4]

If ‘he who has ascended above all the heavens’ has ‘accomplished all’, it is evident that each
of the orders of the celestial powers has truly learned the mental representations which
concern providence, by which they rapidly push towards virtue and the gnosis of God those
who are their inferiors (VI, 76). This is a reflection, based on the Ascension of the Christ, on
the role of the angels in the providence of God, that providence which aims at the return of
all the minds (noes) to the contemplation of the Holy Trinity.

Each of the orders of the heavenly powers has been constituted either completely from
superiors (angels) or completely from inferiors (demons) or from superiors and inferiors
(angels and demons) (II, 78). We have already presented this passage, condemned verbatim
by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 5, but it seems useful to re-present it here so
that the reader might grasp the full dimensions of the Evagrian angelology.

The angels which will have had as disciples the men of the earth will establish the latter, in
the world to come, as heirs of their governance (III, 65). This is parallel to the passage which
we have already seen wherein Evagrius says that worldly men will be led by the demons to an
immoderate vice. Man is as it were not alone in his choices either towards the ascent of
virtue or towards the descent of vice; he has helping him in the one direction the angels, and
in the other direction the demons. And those whom he follows will receive him when he dies
into their own worlds, either angelic and virtuous, or demonic and vicious.

It is evident that those among the saints who have now been delivered from bodies and who
are now mixed with the choirs of angels have also come towards our world on account of the
management of God of the particular salvation of each man (IV, 74). It should be understood
that this being delivered from bodies and being mixed with the angels accords with the stage
to which the ascetic, or saint, has attained before his death—as we have already seen in the
Evagrian doctrine of the four transformations—or even after his death. This again reflects the
structural parallel in Evagrius between the ascetical mystical ascent and the eschatological
mystical ascent.
[1] There might be a problem with the chain of transmission and translation in the text here.

Chapter III -- 38

8 The Evagrian Demonology

The demon is the reasonable nature which has fallen from the service of God on account of
an abundance of the irascible part (thumos) (III, 34). We have already seen in our discussion
of the Evagrian doctrine of the angels, that the demon has a predominance of the irascible
part (thumos). Here, it is used to characterize the demon, ‘which has fallen from the service
of God’.

Just as it is not the fire itself which is in our bodies, but it is its quality which has been placed
in them, so in the bodies of demons, it is not the earth itself nor the water itself, but their
quality, which the Creator has sown there (VI, 26). This is an aspect of Evagrius’ natural
philosophy, but we do not know the significance of it.

Among the demons, some have been called intelligibles which know, and others have also
received the knowledge of that which is intelligible (II, 52). In the judgement that the
Evagrian Christ made which resulted in the assignment of demonic bodies to the minds
(noes) which became demons, some were made to be merely intelligible beings which know,
but some demons in addition received knowledge of that which is intelligible.

‘He who has been created to be the mockery of the angels’ (Job 40, 19; 41, 25) of God, would
he not be he who had the initiative of the Movement, and in the beginning has overstepped
the borders of vice and on account of that has been called ‘the commencement of the
creatures of the Lord’ (Job 40, 19) (VI, 36)? We have already seen this portrait of the Devil.

Men fear Sheol, and the demons the abyss; but there are some of them who are more wicked
that these, that is to say, the serpents which do not have speech (I, 57).
Just as the cranes fly in the form of letters, even though they do not know letters, so also the
demons recite the words of the fear of God, even though they do not know the fear of God
(VI, 37).

The bodies of demons do not increase or decrease; and a strong bad odour accompanies
them, by which they also set in motion our passions, and they are easily known by those who
have received from the Lord the power to perceive this odour (V, 78). This passage is
paraphrased by Evagrius himself almost in its entirety in Chapter 39 of the Treatise on the
Practical Life. The important thing that he adds here is that some ascetics have received
from the Christ the charism of the discernment of spirits, of the bad odour of the demons.
This is a spiritual bad odour. This idea of a charism of discernment of the demons is an
important concept, for St Hesychios himself will present it, in his own way, in the work, On
Sobriety, that we shall analyse in Volume III.

It is said that those who possess light bodies are on high and below, those who possess heavy
bodies; and above the first, those who are lighter than they; but below the second, those who
are heavier than they (II, 68). This seems to refer to the various orders of angels and
demons.

The bodies of the demons possess colour and form but they escape our senses because this
quality does not resemble the quality of the bodies which fall under our senses. In fact, when
they wish to appear to men, they transform themselves into the complete likeness of our
body, without showing to us their own body (I, 22). Recall that the demons cannot alter their
own body but can only imitate the colours, the forms and the size of what, including
themselves, they wish to present to men.

If an essence is not said to be superior or inferior to another essence, and if a demon has
been named by our Saviour worse than another demon (Luke 11, 26), it is evident that it is
not by their essence that the demons are bad (IV, 59).

If many who were not of Israel have accompanied the ancient Israel, is it that, with the new
Israel also, many from among the Egyptians have not gone out? (IV, 64.) This seems to
suggest that many of the demons are in some fashion saved by the Church, the new Israel.
This is not an Orthodox doctrine.

Just as to the sensible Israel are opposed the sensible nations, so to the intelligible Israel are
opposed intelligible nations (VI, 71). We take the intelligible Israel to refer to the Church
although Evagrius nowhere explains himself. But the intelligible nations which are opposed
are clearly the demons.

Among the demons, some are opposed to the practice of the commandments, others are
opposed to the mental representations of nature, and others are opposed to the reasons
(logoi) which concern the Divinity, because the gnosis of our salvation also is composed of
these things (I, 10). The different types of demons have different works or functions (erga).
The demons that are opposed to the practice of the commandments are precisely those
opposed to praktike, the practical life. They work by exciting the passions of man related to
the irascible part (thumos) or to the desiring part (epithumia). Much of Volume II is devoted
to this topic, because for Evagrius, this is precisely the work of praktike, to conquer this
category of demons so as to arrive at dispassion (apatheia).

The next category of demons, mentioned only in passing in Treatise on the Practical Life, is
the demons whose work (ergon) or function it is to impede the next ascetical or
soteriological stage after dispassion (apatheia), the second and first natural contemplations,
here treated globally as one stage—that is the import of the phrase ‘the mental
representations of nature’.

The last category of demons is the category of demons whose work (ergon) it is to oppose the
reasons (logoi) that concern the Divinity. Although the verbal formulation is unusual and
unexpected for the stage of contemplation of the Holy Trinity, we think that what Evagrius
means is that these demons are those which are opposed to the final stage of contemplation,
Theology or the contemplation of the Holy Trinity.

This chapter is very important for the clear distinction it makes among the demons related to
the moral vices that are combated in praktike, the demons related to natural contemplation
and the demons related to Theology. It will be important for us to remember these
distinctions, since Evagrius does not otherwise explain this aspect of his system.

Those who wish to sift us by means of the temptations (cf. Luke 22, 31) either question the
intelligent part of the soul, the mind (nous), or exert themselves to seize the passionate part
of the soul, that is, the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia), or to seize
the body or the environs of the body (I, 25). Those demons that wish to tempt us—this is the
significance of ‘to sift us’—and whose work or function (ergon) it is to disturb natural
contemplation do so by questioning the intelligent part of the soul, the mind (nous). Those
demons who wish to impede praktike do so by exerting themselves to seize the passionate
part of the soul, the desiring part (epithumia) and irascible part (thumos) here taken as a
unity. These demons do not work on any arbitrary part of the passionate part of the soul at
will; they each have the specific work (ergon) of exciting a particular passion. Evagrius adds
that the demons can also exert themselves to seize the body directly—for example, by directly
provoking it to sexual excitement—or else the environs of the body: they may make trouble
around the ascetic in his cell or cave. Recall that the demons are minds (noes) with an ability
to think and decide. They are not merely blind id forces of the unconscious.

The demons that battle with the mind (nous) are called birds; those that disturb the irascible
part (thumos), animals; and those that excite the desiring part (epithumia), beasts (I, 53).
This is a presentation of a typology of the demons according to the tripartite division of the
soul. The actual images used should not be difficult to comprehend.

In regard to the contemplation of beings and in regard to the gnosis of the Trinity, the
demons and we have raised a great battle, the ones with the others, the former wishing to
prevent us from knowing and we in applying ourselves to learn (III, 41). This is another
statement that there are demons that impede natural contemplation, both second and first,
and, here, also Theology, the contemplation of the Holy Trinity or Unity. It sheds light on the
doctrine of KG I, 65.

If the gift of languages is a gift of the Spirit (cf. Acts 2, 4 ff.), and if the demons should be
deprived of this gift, they do not speak in languages. But it is said that by consequence of
study, they know the languages of men; and it is not surprising if they possess them by an
ability to learn, because their constitution is coextensive with the constitution of the world of
men. Someone has said that their languages also are varied on account even of men. There
are even those who say that there exist among the demons even the ancient languages of
man, so that those demons who make use of the Hebrew language are opposed to the
Hebrews, and those demons who speak in the Greek language are opposed to the Greeks,
and so on for the other languages and men (IV, 35). The only thing that needs clarification
here is the notion that the constitution of the demons is coextensive with the constitution of
the world of men. This is true because all the worlds, angelic, human and demonic, are
formed by the same four elements, as we learned in discussing Evagrius’ cosmology. It does
seem, however, that Evagrius is here asserting that demons have a greater kinship with the
world of men than we might otherwise expect, a greater kinship than the angels, say. Recall
that from the order of souls, the mind (nous) can become either a man or a demon; it may be
that that is what Evagrius has in mind here.

If the Kingdom of the Heavens is the contemplation of beings and if the former, according to
the word of our Saviour, ‘is within us’ (cf. Luke 17, 21), and if our interior is occupied by
demons, it is proper that it is said that the Philistines occupy the Promised Land (V, 30).
Among other things, this is a statement of the definition of the Kingdom of the Heavens with
which Evagrius will begin the Treatise on the Practical Life. The contemplation of beings is
here to be understood as second and first natural contemplation taken together. For the rest,
the sense is clear.

When the demons have not been able to put into motion bad thoughts (logismoi) in the
gnostic, then they close his eyes by means of a great cold and they draw them towards a
heavy sleep; for the bodies of demons are very cold, similar to ice (VI, 25). Evagrius himself
paraphrases this passage in Chapter 33 of On the Thoughts. It appears to be based on his
own personal experience. Anathema 4 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod refers to the cold and
dark bodies of the demons, but we think that the Anathema is not condemning the notion
that demons’ bodies are cold, but rather Evagrius’ account of the genesis of demons.[1]

The bread of those who are outside is not a shew bread and their drink is full of flies; but the
bread of those who are inside is a shew bread and their drink is without damage (II, 86). We
are not sure what this passage means, although it certainly refers to the Eucharist.
 Chapter III -- 39
9 The Evagrian Eschatology

Evagrius on eschatology is Evagrius at his most deliberately obscure. Many of the passages
that we present below we do not understand. Moreover, given that the broad outline of the
Evagrian eschatology was condemned in extenso by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, and given
that the Evagrian eschatology really has no ultimate relevance either to the ascetical
endeavour or to Orthodox anthropology, it seems a waste of time to pursue the subtleties of
these Evagrian riddles. However, so that the reader have a complete portrait of the Evagrian
system, we will present below as many chapters as seem to us to refer to the Evagrian
eschatology, without, however, devoting much time to them.

When those things which are together will be lifted up, there will be lifted up also the
number; and when the latter will be lifted up, that which is in us and that in which we must
be will be one thing only (I, 7). This is a clear statement of the condition of the minds (noes)
after the Restoration. ‘Those things which are together’ are the bodies of the minds (noes).
The sense of the lifting up of number is that the minds (noes) will no longer be individuals
but an henad, or unity, of naked minds (noes) which together contemplate the Unity. ‘That
which is in us’ is our mind (nous) and ‘that in which we must be’ is the Unity. We and the
Unity ‘will be one thing only’ in contemplative union. This doctrine was explicitly
condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathemas 11 through 15.

When that in which we must be has been separated, it has engendered that in which we are;
and when that which is in us will be mixed, it will lift up that which will be lifted up with the
number (I, 8). This is more or less a restatement of the preceding chapter. ‘That in which we
must be’ is the Unity. It was separated from us by our negligence in the Movement. The
mixing referred to is the return of all the minds (noes) to the contemplation of the Unity as
part of an henad of minds (noes) within which all personal distinctions are abolished. ‘That
which will be lifted up with the number’ is all the bodies, not just human bodies but also
angelic and demonic bodies, together with the individual attributes of the minds (noes).

When we will have been in that which is, we will see that which is; and when we will have
been in that which is not, we will engender that which is not; and when those things in which
we are will be lifted up, there will no more be that which is not (I, 9). This is yet another
restatement of the same principle. ‘That which is’ is the Unity. ‘We will see that which is’
refers to the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration. ‘When we will have been in that
which is not’ refers to vice and ignorance, which have no substance. ‘We will engender that
which is not’ refers to the vice and ignorance that each mind (nous) engenders by its
negligence, first in the Movement and then in its subsequent incarnations. ‘Those things in
which we are’ are our bodies, whether angelic, human or demonic. They ‘will be lifted up’ in
the Restoration. The statement that ‘there will no more be that which is not’ refers to the
abolition in the Restoration of vice and ignorance.

When the four elements will be lifted up, the five senses also will be lifted up; but, when the
five senses will be lifted up, the four elements will not be lifted up with them (I, 15). The first
part of the passage again refers to the Restoration; it might also refer to the departure of the
soul from the body in death, but that seems unlikely since until the Restoration the minds
(noes) will always have some sort of body. The second part of the passage seems to refer
either to death or to natural contemplation. If it refers to death, then it means that when we
die, we are again, in the Evagrian system, incarnated into a new body. We have already seen
that all the worlds are composed of the same four elements, but with a difference in quality.
If it refers to natural contemplation, then it means that when we pass from the sensibles to
the intelligibles in natural contemplation—this would be the passage from second natural
contemplation to first natural contemplation—, then we will not yet have been freed from the
domain of sensible objects.

That which is separated from the five senses has not been separated from the four elements;
but that which has been separated from the four elements is delivered also from the five
senses (I, 16). This is a restatement of the preceding passage.

When that which is in us will be changed, those things will be changed in which we are, and
that many times, until that which is should no longer be named by modes (I, 17). This is a
clear statement of the continuous succession of incarnations until the Restoration. In the
Restoration, the contingent creation of worlds and bodies is abolished: it is the contingent
creation that is named by modes—by contingency. We are not sure precisely what Evagrius
means by ‘when that which is in us will be changed’. Is he referring to our mind (nous), our
soul, the Unity? None of these seems a satisfactory answer, although the most likely answer
is the mind (nous), where the change occurs to the mind because of its progress or
backsliding in virtue and gnosis. ‘Those things in which we are’ refers to our bodies. The ‘and
many times’ refers to the succession of incarnations in different bodies—angelic or demonic
or, perhaps, human (Evagrius is not clear on reincarnation into a human body)—according
to our works in each life. This chapter is important for its clear expression of Evagrius’
doctrine of successive incarnations. It cannot refer to a succession of Movements,
Judgements and Restorations, since it clearly posits that these changes will continue ‘until
that which is should no longer be named by modes’: this clearly refers to the Restoration,
when contingency will be abolished.

The end of praktike and of torment is the heritage of the saints; but that which is opposed to
the first is the cause of the second, and the end of this is the heritage of those who are
opposed (I, 18). We have already seen that both praktike and torment in Hades purify the
passionate part of the soul. This purification makes one a saint. But those who engage in the
opposite of praktike, which praktike Evagrius defines as the renunciation of vice and the
acquisition of virtue—hence, those who renounce virtue and engage in vice—will come to
torment in Hades, and Hades is the lot of those who are opposed, the demons. But there is
an end to this lot of the demons: in the Restoration they too attain to the contemplation of
the Unity, having come to an end of their torment. This contemplation of the Unity following
the end of their torment is the heritage of the demons.

When only the mental representations of all that which has been produced by chance will be
left in us, then only he who is known will be the sole known of him who knows (I, 20). This
refers to the return of the minds (noes) to the contemplation of the Unity. ‘He who is known’
is the Unity. ‘He who knows’ is the mind (nous). The Unity is the only thing known by the
naked mind (nous) in the contemplation of the Holy Trinity in the Restoration. What we do
not understand is what ‘the mental representations of all that which has been produced by
chance’ means; it does not seem to fit with the rest of the Evagrian system. Perhaps there is a
problem in transmission and translation of the text.

If the human body is a part of this world and ‘The form of this world passes’ (1 Cor. 7, 31), it
is evident that the form of the body will also pass (I, 26). This should be clear in several
senses. In the succession of incarnations, each human will receive a variety of bodies. In the
Restoration, however, there will be no bodies. But Evagrius also has a doctrine of the
spiritual body: in the General Resurrection, just as the Christ was, according to Evagrius,
resurrected with a spiritual body, so will all men. How are the three things put together?

Just as, in the case of bodies, the colours, the forms and the numbers depart, so in the case of
the four elements the matter also is destroyed; in their case, indeed, the matter possesses
this, that it was not and that it has been (I, 29). This seems to have to do with the
philosophical underpinnings of the Evagrian eschatology.

If the Kingdom of the Heavens is known by that which is contained and by that which
contains, the torment also will be known by that which is opposed to these things (I, 44). The
Kingdom of the Heavens is dispassion and natural contemplation, both second and first.[1]
We do not understand to what ‘that which is contained’ and ‘that which contains’ refer. The
torment, of course, is Hades, and Evagrius is saying that within the framework of his
cosmology and his theory of contemplation, Hades is opposite in quality to the Kingdom of
the Heavens.

When the gnosis of those who are first by their sovereignty and who are second by their
genesis will be in the chief things, then only those who are first by their sovereignty will
receive the gnosis of the Trinity (I, 52). We are not sure how this is to be understood. ‘Those
who are first by their sovereignty’ refers to the minds (noes). ‘Those who are second by their
genesis’ must refer to bodies, since all the reasonable nature, the minds (noes), were created
in a single act of God before the Movement. But we do not understand how Evagrius wants to
combine the two phrases, nor do we understand the import of his conclusion. The most likely
explanation is that those who are first are the minds (noes), that those who are second are
the bodies given to the minds (noes) and that in the Restoration the minds (noes) will enjoy
the contemplation of the Unity without their bodies.

The plenitude of those who are first by their sovereignty is without end and the void is
contained in a limit. The beings which are second are coextensive with the void and they will
rest when the plenitude will make those who are susceptible of it approach the immaterial
gnosis (I, 54). This appears to refer to the Restoration and the contemplation of the Unity by
the henad of minds (noes) without their bodies.
Those only who are first by their genesis will be delivered from corruption which is in act;
but in this there is not one among the beings which will be delivered of that which is in
potentiality (I, 55). ‘Those who are first by their genesis’ are the minds (noes). Only they will
remain after the Restoration. The second clause seems to say that in the Restoration, the
minds (noes) will lose their ‘corruption in act’ but they will not lose their potential for
negligence, so that there might be an infinite succession of Movements and Restorations.
This interpretation seems to accord with Origen’s own terse remarks in Peri Archon.[2]

The good will be the cause of gnosis and of torment, and the wicked of torment only (I, 56).
That the good will be the cause of gnosis is clear; that the good should also be the cause of
torment is not so clear: Evagrius might be referring to the angelic powers who execute
judgements on the wicked. That the wicked should be the cause of torment is clear: the
demons are tormented in Hades; they torment the wicked in Hades; and they lead the
wicked to greater wickedness, so causing their greater torment in Hades.

One of the deaths has for its first cause, birth; another comes from the saints against those
who do not live according to righteousness; and the mother of the third will be the
forgiveness. And if he is mortal who is naturally made to be liberated from the body to which
he is joined, assuredly immortal is he who is not naturally made that that might happen to
him. Indeed, all those who have been joined to bodies necessarily also will be liberated from
them (I, 58). This seems to refer first to the succession of incarnations—this is the death
whose first cause is birth. The second death seems to be the spiritual death of the soul, or
else the soul’s chastisement in Hades. The third death has to do with the General
Resurrection. At the General Resurrection, all the bodies are put off in favour of spiritual
bodies, and the minds (noes) begin an upward ascent to the contemplation of the Unity. He
who is immortal we would take to be the naked mind (nous). The passage is difficult.

If today they receive the wise steward (Luke 16, 1–8) into their homes, it is evident that
yesterday they sat down and modified their bills. Notwithstanding, he has been called ‘wise’
in the proportion that he has remitted more than he was capable of receiving (I, 60).

That which the sensible death has the custom of doing in us, equally ‘the just judgement of
God’ (2 Thess. 1, 5) will realize for the other reasonable beings, at the time that ‘He will be
ready to judge the living and the dead’ (1 Pet. 4, 5), and when ‘He will render to each
according to his works.’ (Rev. 22, 12.) (I, 82.) We take this to refer not to the Last Judgement
but to those intermediate judgements that all the minds (noes) undergo until the General
Resurrection. What Evagrius seems to be saying is that the angels and the demons are
judged similarly to men, but in a different way.

If today is that which is called the Friday when our Saviour was crucified, then all those who
are dead are the symbol of his tomb, because with them the justice of God is dead, which will
live again on the third day and be resurrected clothed again with a spiritual body, if ‘Today
and tomorrow, he does miracles and on the third day, he is completed.’ (Luke 13, 32.) (I, 90.)
Here is a clear statement of the Evagrian—and Origenist—doctrine of the General
Resurrection with the spiritual body.

These will be the heirs for the soul after death: those who have been helpers for it for virtue
or vice (II, 7). We have already remarked on the content of this chapter: every man has the
choice of following the angels or following the demons, and those whom he follows in this life
for virtue or vice will receive him into their habitations after his death.

Chapter III -- 40

The destruction of worlds, the dissolution of bodies and the abolition of names accompany
the gnosis which concerns the reasonable beings, whereas there remains the equality of
gnosis according to the equality of substances (II, 17). This particular passage is important
because of its clear statement of the Evagrian doctrine that when in the Restoration all the
minds (noes) return to the contemplation of the Unity, then all the worlds, bodies and names
(ranks) will be abolished, while there will remain, according to Evagrius, the equality of
gnosis of the Unity according to the equality of substances of the minds (noes).

Intellectually speaking, it would appear that Evagrius was led to the notion of the abolition of
every contingent aspect of the minds (noes), including names, by his philosophy of substance
and attribute. This particular passage does not make it clear whether according to Evagrius
the minds (noes) will remain individual monads without individual characteristics or
whether they will be fused into one great henad of minds (noes) which participate together in
the contemplation of the Unity.
However, this chapter, whatever its details might be, is heretical. It was quoted verbatim by
the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 14. It might be further remarked that the doctrine
in the Letter to Melania of the absorption of the body, soul (psuche) and mind (nous) into
the Godhead is inconsistent with the doctrine of the present chapter of the Kephalaia
Gnostica.[1]

We now see some chapters of a group which bases itself on a complicated metaphor of the
seed and the ear of wheat which comes from the seed. We present these chapters simply for
completeness.

Just as this body is called the seed of the ear of wheat to come, so also this present world will
be called seed of that which will be after it (II, 25).

He who first has taken the ear of grain is the first of those who have the grain; and he who
has taken the second ear is the first of those who have the first ear; and he who has taken the
third ear is the first of those who have the second ear, and in the same way in regard to all
the others, until he abandon the last and first ear, that which has not, insofar as it is last, the
power of the grain (II, 49). This complicated metaphor depends on the succession of
incarnations before the General Resurrection.

If the ear of wheat is in potentiality in the seed, perfection in potentiality also is in him who
is susceptible of it. And if this is so, the seed and that which is in it are not the same thing,
nor the ear and that which is in the seed; but the seed of that which is contained by the ear
and the ear of this seed are the same thing. Indeed, even though the seed become an ear, the
seed of that which is in the ear has not yet received the ear. But when it will be liberated from
the ear and the seed, it will possess the ear of this first seed (I, 24). This is too complicated.

If ‘the wheat’ bears the sign of virtue and ‘the straw’ the sign of vice (Matt. 3, 12), the world to
come is the sign of the amber which will attract the straw to it (II, 26). We wonder if ‘the
world to come’ does not refer to the world after the General Resurrection. What the passage
would then mean is that that new spiritual world would draw the demons to it as amber
draws straw. This would be the mechanism of the salvation of the demons.
When those who are giving birth will have ceased to give birth, then also ‘The guardians of
the house will tremble’ (Eccl. 12, 3); then also the two heads will be adorned with rose and
linen (II, 50). We are not sure to what stage of the eschatological unfolding this refers. We
think that it must refer to the reception of the spiritual body in the General Resurrection,
although it might just as well refer to the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration.

When the minds (noes) will have received the contemplation which pertains to them, then
also all the nature of the bodies will be lifted up, and thus the contemplation which concerns
the nature of the bodies will become immaterial (II, 62). This is a clear statement of the
return in the Restoration to the contemplation of the Unity. At that time, bodies of every
kind are abolished and the second natural contemplation will become immaterial. If
Evagrius means anything more than that the minds (noes) will thenceforth engage as naked
minds (noes) in the contemplation of the Unity, we do not know what it might be, since both
bodies and worlds will have been abolished, and we are not able to say what else there would
be to contemplate—perhaps the reasons (logoi) of the bodies and worlds. The contemplation
which pertains to the minds (noes) is the first natural contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of
the reasonable beings; it is the necessary preliminary to entry into the contemplation of the
Unity.

The separated will become inseparables, when they receive the contemplation of the things
which have separated them (II, 67). This is a clear statement of the abolition of personal
characteristics of the naked minds (noes) in the contemplation of the Unity in the
Restoration. ‘The separated will become inseparables’ indicates that the individual minds
(noes) become fused into one great henad of minds (noes) which participate as an henad in
the contemplation of the Unity. ‘The contemplation of the things which have separated them’
is again the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of the reasonable beings, although
broadened to include the contemplation of the Judgement.

The Holy Spirit has not made known to us the first division of the reasonable beings and the
genesis of bodies, but it has revealed to us the present division of reasonable beings and the
transformation of bodies (II, 69). The first part of this chapter refers to the genesis of bodies
in the First Judgement after the Movement, and to the ranking thereby of the minds (noes),
about which Scripture is silent. The second part indicates, according to Evagrius, that
Scripture instructs us concerning the present orders of reasonable beings—the angels, men
and demons—and concerning our and also the angels’ and demons’ repeated incarnations in
new bodies according to ‘merit’ in each life. Perhaps the second part means that Scripture
informs us of the spiritual bodies that, according to Evagrius, we will have after the
Resurrection.

He who advances towards gnosis draws near to the excellent change of bodies; but he who
advances towards ignorance advances towards the bad change of bodies (II, 79). This is clear.
This refers to just those repeated incarnations in bodies that we referred to in discussing the
previous chapter. It is a clear formulation of the Evagrian principle that we have found
convenient to nickname ‘merit’.

There has been a time when the Lord was judge only of the living, but there will not be a time
when he will be judge only of the dead, and there will be anew a time when he will be judge
only of the living (II, 84). ‘The Lord’ here, it should be apparent, is for Evagrius the Christ.
He was the judge of the living minds (noes) immediately after the Movement, in the First
Judgement, on the basis of which he, the Evagrian Christ, created the bodies and worlds for
the minds (noes). ‘There will not be a time when he will be judge only of the dead’ can have
two meanings: either that virtue will never be absent from the creation, or that the Second
Coming, as St Paul himself says, will find some men alive on earth. The time anew when the
Evagrian Christ will be the judge only of the living is the time after the General Resurrection,
when all will have spiritual bodies, but before the Restoration, when all, including the Christ,
will participate as brothers in the contemplation of the Unity. That after the Resurrection the
Christ will be a judge—if this is to be taken literally—suggests that after the Resurrection the
minds (noes) will continue to have free will. But the matter is ambiguous: Evagrius
elsewhere indicates that in the General Resurrection all will attain to dispassion (apatheia)
and then proceed along the road of gnosis to the contemplation of the Unity in the
Restoration.

If the living are susceptible of increase and decrease, it is evident, then, that it is those who
are opposed to those who are dead who receive the same things. And if this is so, there will
anew be varied bodies, and the worlds which are appropriate to them will be created (II, 85).
We do not completely understand this chapter. The second sentence, of course, refers to the
succession of incarnations in various bodies and worlds before the General Resurrection.
O’Laughlin takes it to be an indication that Evagrius espouses a doctrine that after the
Restoration, there might again be a Movement, a Judgement and so on.[2] If that is what
Evagrius means, it would seem to reflect a Stoic element in his thinking.

Those who will have seen the light of the two luminaries are those who will see the first and
blessed light, which we will see in the Christ, when by an excellent change we will be
resurrected before his face (II, 90). We are not sure what these two luminaries are, unless
Evagrius means the sun and the moon, and unless he therefore means ‘all men who have
lived on the face of the earth’. It is also possible that he is referring to second and first
natural contemplation. However, judging from Anathema 3 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod,
Evagrius is referring to the natural contemplation of the sun and moon, which according to
him are reasonable beings. Here, we also have a reference to the Resurrection, which,
according to Evagrius will occur with spiritual bodies—this is the significance of ‘excellent
change’. Note that in the Evagrian system the ‘first and blessed light’—this is the gnosis of the
Unity—is in the Christ, not the Christ himself. We have already seen this aspect of Evagrius’
Christology.

Chapter III -- 41

In the world to come the bodies of ignorance will be surpassed, and in that world
which will follow it, the change will receive an increase of fire and air; and those who are
below will apply themselves thenceforth to gnosis, if ‘the houses of the impious receive
purification’ (Prov. 14, 9) and if ‘Today and tomorrow’ the Christ ‘works miracles and on the
third day he is completed.’ (Luke 13, 32.) (III, 9.) This is a clear statement that in the world
to come, the demons will give themselves over to pursuing virtue. We find it somewhat
ambiguous, however: does Evagrius mean the world to come in the succession of bodies and
worlds that occurs up until the General Resurrection; is he referring directly to the
Resurrection with a spiritual body; or is he referring to the Restoration, when the spiritual
bodies will be put off? We think that he is referring to the General Resurrection with the
spiritual body, which is a tool of gnosis: this is the significance of the increase of fire and air:
they are the vehicle of gnosis.[1] The bodies of ignorance are our ordinary gross human
bodies.
 What certainly is ambiguous in the present chapter is how Evagrius envisages the
‘redemption’ of the demons: Are they drawn to the upward path of virtue during the
succession of bodies and worlds, so that they ‘will apply themselves henceforth to gnosis’? Do
they change their ways in the General Resurrection—indeed do they then receive spiritual
bodies? Or is their redemption delayed until the Restoration? We cannot answer these
questions with certainty, but we think that the chapter is teaching that the demons are
‘saved’ at the General Resurrection.

As we have already pointed out, the basic problem is that Evagrius is following
Origen, who has attempted to combine the Stoic doctrine of the endless repetition of the one
world into the past and future; the Platonic idea of the timeless creation of the world and the
descent of the minds into souls and then bodies; and the Christian concept of the
Resurrection with a transformed body—all with Origen’s own concept of the Restoration of
all Things. Perhaps Origen and Evagrius could put these concepts together in a coherent way,
but we ourselves find them confusingly incompatible.

Each of the changes is established to nourish the reasonable beings, and those who nourish
themselves with it arrive at the excellent change, but those who do not nourish themselves
with it arrive at the bad change (III, 7). This is a repetition of the doctrine that the
intermediate incarnation that one obtains depends on his ‘merit’. It cannot refer to the
General Resurrection for the reason that all are then ‘saved’ and receive a spiritual body.
Even if we were to be proved wrong on this point, given that in the Evagrian system, in the
Restoration of All Things all the minds (noes) are ‘saved’, including the demons, and given
that the demons are now most emphatically not ‘saved’, at some point in Evagrius’ system
the demons have to be ‘saved’. We ourselves think that that takes place at the General
Resurrection.

If the perfection of the mind (nous) is the immaterial gnosis, as it is said, and if the
immaterial gnosis is the Trinity only, it is evident that in perfection there will not remain
anything of matter. And if that is so, the mind (nous) henceforth naked will become a seer of
the Trinity (III, 15). This is a clear presentation of the Evagrian doctrine of the putting off in
the Restoration of all material (and spiritual) bodies by the minds (noes), and of their
thenceforth participating as naked minds (noes) in the immaterial contemplation of the Holy
Trinity. It is important for the connections it makes between perfect gnosis and the
substance of the Holy Trinity, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, between that gnosis
and the immateriality of the minds (noes) in the Restoration. In content, this chapter is very
close to Anathema 11 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

Torment is the intense suffering which purifies the passionate part of the soul (III, 18).

The change of the organa, or bodies, is the passage from body to body, according to the
degree of the orders of those which are joined with them (III, 20). This is a clear statement
that according to the ‘merit’ of the mind (nous), that mind (nous) will receive a better or
worse body, and world, in each passage from body to body—what we, for simplicity, have
called an ‘incarnation’. It cannot refer to the reception of the spiritual body in the General
Resurrection, because Evagrius is elsewhere clear that the spiritual body is a completely
different sort of thing from the normal human body: ‘passage from body to body’ is
inconsistent with the change in the General Resurrection from the normal human body to a
spiritual body:

The spiritual body and its opposite will not be formed from our members or from our parts,
but of a body. The change, indeed, is not a passage from members to members, but the
passage from an excellent or bad quality to an excellent or bad change (III, 25). This is a
statement that the spiritual body given at the Resurrection will not be the human body
transformed, the Orthodox doctrine, but a completely different spiritual body, which,
Evagrius asserts, the Christ had at his resurrection. There is a question about the bad change,
however: do some receive a bad ‘spiritual body’ in the General Resurrection? If so, how do
they then arrive at the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration? The doctrine of the
spiritual body was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 10.

The ‘last trumpet’ (1 Cor. 15, 52) is the commandment of the judge who has joined the
reasonable beings to the bodies which are good or bad, after which there will not be a bad
body (III, 40). This is a statement that when the Evagrian Christ comes again for the Last
Judgement—for it is the Evagrian Christ who made the First Judgement after the Movement
—then all will be given a spiritual body. The phrase ‘after which there will not be a bad body’
does not specify with exactness, but obliquely, the doctrine of the spiritual body. This
passage seems to imply that it is with this spiritual body that in the Restoration all will
participate in the contemplation of the Unity, and that would mean that the abolition of
names that Evagrius has referred to elsewhere would be accomplished while the minds
(noes) were not naked but engaged in the contemplation of the Unity with their spiritual
bodies. In Peri Archon, there is a sense in which the putting off of the spiritual body in the
passage from the General Resurrection to the Restoration is to be understood as the
progressive etherealization of the spiritual body. However, in Evagrius, the spiritual body
given in the General Resurrection is transitional: it will be put off and the minds (noes) will
enter into the contemplation of the Unity as naked minds (noes). This passage also indicates
that at the stage of the Resurrection and the granting of the (good) spiritual bodies, then the
demons are included: either they have already been ‘redeemed’, or the General Resurrection
and the granting of spiritual bodies is the act of forgiveness which redeems them. There is a
further ambiguity in Evagrius’ doctrine: how does the Last Judgement (the ‘last trumpet’)
articulate with the General Resurrection and the Restoration of All Things? In some passages
of the Kephalaia Gnostica, the natural interpretation is that the Last Judgement occurs at
the General Resurrection, with the putting off of material bodies and the granting of spiritual
bodies, but in other passages, the natural interpretation is that the Last Judgement occurs at
the Restoration, when even the spiritual bodies are put off.

The change happening ‘in the blink of an eye’ (1 Cor. 15, 52) is unique which will overtake
each one according to his degree by consequence of the judgement and which will establish
the body of each according to the degree of his order. Indeed, that someone might say that
there is a change in the parts beyond that which is common, is the act of him who does not
know the mental representations of the judgement (III, 47). The second statement seems to
be saying that anyone who asserts that the General Resurrection occurs with the
transformation of the human body, and not with a spiritual body, is a person who has not
experienced the contemplation of the judgement. This is interesting for its witness how
Evagrius understands the relation between mental representation and contemplation and
how he understands contemplation, here contemplation of the judgement; and for its
witness that Evagrius developed much of his doctrine on the basis of what he himself
experienced in contemplation. Although in the basic schema of the contemplations involved
in the mystical assent, the contemplations of providence and the judgement are not present,
elsewhere Evagrius lists the two contemplations as among the five basic types of
contemplation. What Evagrius seems to be saying is that he, Evagrius, has experienced in its
fullness this contemplation of the judgement, and this is what he has learned.
The first part of the chapter is interesting for its assertion that the General Resurrection will
overtake each one in the order that he is—that is, according to the ‘merit’ that he has or has
not. That would mean that all are not equal with the granting of the spiritual body; this is
Origen’s doctrine in Peri Archon. Hence, the transition from the General Resurrection to the
Restoration would involve the evolution of all the beings towards a state in which from
beings with spiritual bodies of different degrees (‘orders’), they became naked minds (noes)
contemplating the Unity in a single henad from which all personal differences and degrees,
including that of the Christ, had been annihilated. It should be noted that the spiritual body
is called by Evagrius a gnostic organon, or tool; this implies that after the General
Resurrection the minds (noes) will make an upward mystical ascent of gnosis facilitated by
that spiritual body, until they put that body off in the Restoration. This should be contrasted
with the condition of the minds (noes) prior to the General Resurrection, when they are
being incarnated from one world to another and from one body to another according to their
‘merit’ in each life. It should also be remarked that Evagrius elsewhere teaches that at the
General Resurrection all the minds (noes) are granted dispassion (apatheia), the
precondition of the gnostic ascent to the Trinity. Finally, it should be noted that in this series
of chapters there is an ambiguity concerning the nature of the spiritual body: some of the
chapters indicate that the spiritual body is good for the good and bad for the bad; others
indicate that the spiritual body is uniformly good; and so on.

The change of the righteous is the passage from praktika and seeing bodies to bodies seeing
or very seeing (III, 48). The seeing or very seeing bodies can be most easily understood as
angelic bodies. This is the change that we have called the ‘incarnation’ into a new body and
new world, in the succession of worlds before the General Resurrection.

The change of sinners is the passage of praktika or demonic bodies to those which are very
heavy and dark (III, 50). ‘Change of sinners’ has the sense not of repentance or conversion
but of Evagrius’ doctrine of the judgement after death prior to the granting of a new body
according to one’s ‘merit’ when judged. He is saying that sinners, not only men but also
demons, will be granted a new body in the change and that this body will be a heavy and dark
—a demonic or more demonic—body. We are still in the succession of worlds prior to the
General Resurrection: the previously cited chapter discussed the change for the righteous;
this chapter describes the change for sinful men and demons. If these chapters were
discussing the spiritual body received at the General Resurrection, then Evagrius’ doctrine as
enunciated in this series of chapters would be entirely incoherent.

All the changes which occur before the world to come have joined some with excellent bodies
and others with bad bodies. But those changes which will occur after the world which will
come will join all with gnostic organa (bodies) (III, 51). Here we have a clear statement that
after the succession of incarnations into better or worse bodies according to merit before the
General Resurrection, then in the Second Coming of the Evagrian Christ, that is, in the
General Resurrection, all will receive a spiritual body, a gnostic organon. From what has
been said elsewhere, these bodies will all be excellent, but not all identical: they will reflect
the ‘merit’ of each mind (nous) at the time of the Second Coming, the ‘last trumpet’ that
Evagrius refers to.

Skemmata 6 provides a clarification of what Evagrius means: ‘In respect of virtue, we will be
one on the eighth day; in respect of gnosis, however, we will be one on the last day.’ [2] This
indicates that in Evagrius’ thought, in the General Resurrection, all will attain to dispassion
(apatheia)—this is the significance of our all being one in virtue on the eighth day—and that
then all will begin the upward ascent of gnosis by means of the gnostic organon, the spiritual
resurrection body, so as to attain to the contemplation of the Unity. Then, on the last day—in
the Restoration—all will be one in gnosis having put off the spiritual body and having
entered into the contemplation of the Unity.

Just as the first trumpet has made known the genesis of bodies, so also the ‘last trumpet’ (1
Cor. 15, 52) will make known the destruction of bodies (III, 66). The first trumpet is the First
Judgement that the Evagrian Christ made after the Movement, so as to give the minds (noes)
their bodies and worlds. The ‘last trumpet’ refers either to the General Resurrection, when all
will receive a new, spiritual, body, or to the Restoration, when even that spiritual body will be
put off and the minds (noes) will nakedly contemplate the Unity. Here it refers to the
Restoration.

Just as the first ‘rest’ (Gen. 2, 2) of God will make known the diminution of vice and
the disappearance of gross bodies, so also the second will make known the destruction of
bodies, second beings, and the diminution of ignorance (III, 68). Here, Evagrius is saying
clearly that the spiritual bodies are an intermediate stage: they replace the gross bodies,
which are the normal human bodies that we have now. This is the first ‘rest’, which occurs at
the General Resurrection. The second ‘rest’ brings about the contemplation of the Unity by
the naked minds (noes); it occurs at the Restoration. Note again that the General
Resurrection brings about a condition of universal dispassion (apatheia)—this is the
significance of ‘diminution of vice’—whereas the Restoration brings about a condition of
universal gnosis—this is the significance of ‘diminution of ignorance’.

If ‘the day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5, 2), no one among those who
are in the house knows at what hour or in what day he will disrobe those who sleep (III, 73).
It is curious that ‘those who sleep’ will be ‘disrobed’, which would seem to mean that their
mind (nous) would be divested of its clothing. What is Evagrius referring to here? The soul?
The body that each mind (nous) had in each of the worlds? The spiritual body that each will
have been granted after the General Resurrection, so that Evagrius would be referring to the
putting off of the spiritual body and to the commencement of the contemplation of the Unity
by the naked minds (noes)? For we understand Evagrius to say that after death, each man
passes by a good or bad change to another body and another world. Possibly, what Evagrius
means here is this: we live once on the face of this earth and then we die. We do not return to
this earth, so we are to be considered dead. But within that state of being dead, we are
granted new bodies and new worlds in a succession of ‘incarnations’ until the General
Resurrection, when we put off our old bodies—those we had on earth and those we had in the
worlds after death—and we put on the spiritual bodies, then to make the ascent to the
contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration. This is a somewhat speculative explanation
since Evagrius is himself not at all clear.

By means of those of whom it has narrated the life and death, the Holy Spirit has also
proclaimed in advance the resurrection that will occur (III, 77). Evagrius means: ‘in
Scripture’.

If the ‘wealth of God’ (cf. Rom. 11, 33) which is to come is the spiritual contemplation of the
worlds which will be, those who limit the Kingdom of the Heavens to the palace and to the
belly will be confounded (IV, 30). We have already met with the concept of the
contemplation of the worlds as a stage in the first natural contemplation after the
contemplation of the angels. Here, however, this contemplation is placed in the context of
Evagrius’ eschatology. We are not sure what Evagrius wants to say regarding the Kingdom of
the Heavens, which he has elsewhere defined as dispassion (apatheia) and natural
contemplation: we do not know what he means by ‘the palace and the belly’. However, we do
not think that the solution is to treat this passage as a statement about asceticism, given that
Evagrius refers to the worlds which will be. We are bemused.

Chapter III -- 42

In the world to come, no one will evade the prison in which he will fall, for it is said ‘You will
not depart from there, until you have given the last coin’ (Matt. 5, 26), which is a minimal
suffering (IV, 34). This clearly refers to the succession of worlds and to the punishment that
awaits the wicked. Afterwards, however, there is the General Resurrection, the granting of a
spiritual body, and, finally, the Restoration. Hence, contrary to the Orthodox doctrine, the
giving of the last coin implies that there is a last coin to give: the torment of Hades has an
end for all.

In the world to come, the irascible man will not be counted with the angels, neither will there
be entrusted to him a principality. Indeed, he does not see on account of the passion; easily
he becomes angry with those who are guided by him; he falls from the vision; and he casts
those whom he guides into danger. For these two things are foreign to the angelic order (IV,
38).

If in the worlds to come, God shows his wealth to the reasonable beings, it is evident that he
will do that in those who will be after him who comes, because before his coming, the
reasonable beings will not be able to receive his holy wealth (IV, 39). ‘After him who comes’
is a reference to the Second Coming of Christ. Evagrius wants to say that a precondition for
the return to the contemplation of the Unity, attained not directly but through an ascent
guided by the returned Christ through the contemplation of all the worlds, is the reception
from the returned Christ of a spiritual body which will be the ‘gnostic organon’ that enables
the mind (nous) to make the contemplative ascent. This is the significance of the chapter
above which stated that what would be given to each mind (nous) would be a gnostic
organon. That is, the spiritual body is the gnostic organon or tool which makes possible the
eschatological mystical ascent in contemplation through all the worlds to the contemplation
of the Unity. Before entry into the contemplation of the Unity, the mind (nous) will divest
this spiritual body so as to contemplate the Unity anew as a naked mind (nous). As we have
already pointed out, however, there is a sense in Peri Archon in which during the final
mystical ascent the spiritual body is not so much divested as progressively etherealized.

In the second natural contemplation, it is said, by necessity some are chiefs and others are
subjected to the chiefs. But in the Unity, there will not be those who might be chiefs, nor
those who might be submitted to the chiefs, but all will be gods (IV, 51). This is a statement
of the conditions which will obtain in the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration.
While we have found a certain ambiguity in how Evagrius conceives of the state of the minds
(noes) in the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration, here he is clearly saying that
hierarchical relations among the minds (noes) will be abolished. Moreover, it is well to recall
Evagrius’ doctrine that when the mind (nous) has engaged in the contemplation of the Unity,
then it is called God.[1] The doctrine of this chapter was implicitly condemned by the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod in Anathemas 12, 13 and 14.

The resurrection of the body is the passage from the bad quality to the superior quality (V,
19). This seems to be speaking about the nature of the spiritual body. It also seems to be
related to the idea that the spiritual body will not be the same for all: it will be better for each
mind (nous), but, evidently, of various degrees: this is how we understand the use of the
comparative ‘superior’ rather than the superlative ‘best’. As we have already remarked, the
notion that after the General Resurrection the spiritual body will not be the same for all is
consistent with Peri Archon.

Just as Paradise is the habitation of the just, so Hades is the place of punishment of sinners
(VI, 8—Greek fragment as emended).

Just as this word here teaches concerning the objects in this world, so the word of the
spiritual body will make known the objects of the world to come (VI, 23). This asserts that in
the sensible world cognition occurs in a different fashion from in the world after the General
Resurrection. If ‘word’ is here taken to mean ‘reason (logos)’—a good possibility in the Greek
—then Evagrius is saying that after the Resurrection, the mind (nous) clothed in the spiritual
body will cognize the world in which it finds itself by means of the powers inherent in its
spiritual body, and these powers will not be the same as those the human mind (nous) now
has in its sensible body. This is consistent with the notion that the spiritual body is a gnostic
organon or tool.
If those who in the world to come will be angels ruling also ‘over five’ or ‘over ten cities’, it is
evident that they will also receive the gnosis that can push the reasonable souls from vice to
virtue and from ignorance to the gnosis of God (VI, 24). This seems to refer to men who
become angels in the world to come: they will be given the requisite gnosis so that they too
can push—urge or impel—those over whom they have charge, towards virtue and away from
vice. We have already seen that this is one of the main works (erga) of the angels, and of the
saints who have attained to the ranks of the angels, this providential ‘pushing’ of men
towards virtue. What is not clear, however, is where the world to come of this chapter is to be
positioned in the Evagrian eschatological scheme. For the only plausible place it might be put
is in the succession of worlds prior to the General Resurrection, when all will receive
spiritual bodies and commence the upward ascent to the contemplation of the Unity. It is
conceivable, however, that it refers to the ascent of gnosis after the General Resurrection and
is stating that the more advanced minds (noes), including those of men, will help the less
advanced minds (noes) to progress

Chapter III -- 43

In the worlds, God ‘will change the body of our humiliation into the likeness of the glorious
body’ (cf. Phil. 3, 21) of the Lord; and, after all the worlds, he will also make us ‘in the
likeness of the image of his Son’ (Rom. 8, 29), if the image of his Son is the essential gnosis of
God the Father (VI, 34). This clarifies the temporal sequence of events in the Restoration:
First, there will be the Second Coming and all men will receive a spiritual body. With this
spiritual body all the minds (noes) will ascend through the contemplation of all the worlds to
the contemplation of the Unity. When they will have attained to the contemplation of the
Unity, the culmination of the Restoration, then they will be made into ‘the likeness of the
image of his Son’, becoming gods without hierarchical differentiation, without names, and
even without spiritual bodies: they will be naked minds (noes), so that ‘the likeness of the
image of his Son’ is the state of being a naked mind (nous) engaged in the contemplation of
the Unity as part of an henad of naked minds (noes). This is what it means to be a coheir of
Christ. It is well to recall that in KG V, 81, Evagrius states that a mind (nous) which engages
in the contemplation of the Holy Trinity will be called God because it will be able to found
diverse worlds. Hence, the significance of what Evagrius is saying in the present chapter is
that in the Restoration, in the contemplation of the Unity, all minds (noes) will become gods
as part of the henad of naked minds (noes) and that this is what it means for them to be ‘in
the likeness of the image of his Son’.
The judgement of God will make whoever will have followed Joshua, to enter into the
Promised land (Num. 32, 1–5; Josh. 1, 14–15), in giving him a spiritual body and a world
appropriate to him; but he will install those who on account of the abundance of their
possessions will not be able to obtain it, on the bank of the Jordan according to their rank
(VI, 47). This must refer to the Second Coming of Christ. It seems to suggest that those who
have been subject to the passion of avarice will not, in the Second Coming, be able to make
the spiritual ascent to the contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration. We do not know
what to make of this doctrine that some will be installed on the banks of the Jordan because
of the abundance of their possessions. It does not seem to be developed elsewhere in the
Kephalaia Gnostica, nor does it seem to be consistent with Evagrius’ doctrine of the
universal salvation of all minds (noes) in the Restoration. However, it is to be found in Peri
Archon, where Origen, however, does not explain it in any greater detail.[1]

Among the bodies, those which will have been given after the change will be, it is said,
spiritual bodies. But if that will happen, in the end, from the matter or from the organa, or
bodies, which they will have, examine this, you also, truly (VI, 58). This is clearly a veiled
statement of the doctrine, condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod in Anathema 10, that
the spiritual body is not merely a transformed human body, but a different sort of thing
entirely.

It must be remarked that although the Kephalaia Gnostica is confusing on eschatology, it is

somewhat less confusing if one takes into account Peri Archon. It seems that Evagrius was
taking Origen’s own theories for granted in writing his own aphoristic chapters. However, we
think that the fundamental structural problem of Origen’s attempt to combine a number of
incompatible cosmologies into a coherent theory is, apart from Evagrius’ own deliberate wish
to be obscure, responsible for the difficulty that we have in comprehending Evagrius on
eschatology.

Let us now turn to an evaluation of the Evagrian cosmology from an Orthodox point of view.

Chapter III -- 44

10 Evaluation of the Evagrian Cosmological System

Evagrius is ‘New Age’. Much of the cosmology he propounds is current in ‘New Age’ circles
today. Many of his cosmological ideas bear a striking resemblance to Buddhism. In fact, the
resemblances are so striking we wish to remark that Tibet was converted to Buddhism
several hundred years after Evagrius’ death. Moreover, Evagrius’ life is well known and
without unexplainable gaps. He lived in Asia Minor, Constantinople, Jerusalem and Egypt
just south of Alexandria. There is no record of his having had contact with Buddhists—
although the religion is referred to as existing by writers in Alexandria and Jerusalem before
and during Evagrius’ time. It was referred to in passing c.200 by Clement of Alexandria,
whom Evagrius is known to have read.[1] It was known by St Cyril of Jerusalem (313–386) in
his Catechisms (spoken 348, very close to the time when Evagrius was in Jerusalem) as one
of the sources of Manes, the founder of Manichæism. But there is no record of Evagrius’
having met with Buddhists or of his having been influenced by them.

Possibly, this resemblance of Evagrius’ cosmological theories to Buddhism has something to

do with the influence of Plotinus on Evagrius. This is a somewhat difficult matter, because
both Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, and Origen were fellow students of Ammonius
Saccas, so there are bound to be similarities between their two cosmologies. There are
nonetheless striking parallels between certain of Evagrius Pontikos’ positions and those of
Plotinus. And Plotinus’ Neoplatonism is similar to Buddhism, as indeed to the sorts of
teachings that are found in ‘New Age’ circles today.

The similarity of Evagrius to Plotinus is especially evident in Evagrius’ system of

contemplation: Evagrius’ doctrine expressed in Chapter 40 of On the Thoughts that the
mental representations of sensible objects must be put off so that the ascetic can receive the
mental representations of intelligibles[2] is both Platonic and Plotinian. However, taken as a
whole, the ‘atmosphere’ of Plotinus is quite different from that of either Origen or Evagrius:
the latter two are definitely Christians, even if heretics, whereas Plotinus is definitely a
pagan.

In the matter of contemplation there is also clearly a direct influence on Evagrius of Clement
of Alexandria. Many of Evagrius’ basic concepts, such as ‘dispassion (apatheia)’, the ‘gnostic’
and the three stages of the spiritual life—‘praktike’, ‘natural contemplation’ and ‘Theology’—,
are taken directly from Clement. Clement himself had a Platonic orientation joined to an
openness to the truths in Stoicism, Epicureanism and Aristotelianism. However, while
Clement seems to have laid the theoretical foundation for Evagrius’ ascetical and
contemplative doctrines, Evagrius developed them far more intensively than Clement:
Clement did not have the intense experience of asceticism that Evagrius had.

Evagrius is traditionally believed to have built his cosmological doctrines on those of Origen
and we certainly see that many of his key cosmological ideas are to be found in Peri Archon,
even in the form that that work has come down to us. However, Evagrius himself seems to
have been responsible for the development of those ideas into the form in which they were
condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod: the fit between the Kephalaia Gnostica and the
Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod is remarkable.

Didymus the Blind does seem to have been Evagrius’ teacher and he also was condemned for
Origenism at the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, but there is nothing, apparently, in the extant
writings of Didymus that would make of him an Origenist of the sort of Evagrius. That, of
course, is not to say that in his lost writings or in his oral teachings Didymus was not an
Origenist, nor a key link in the development of Origen’s ideas into the form in which they are
found in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

It would appear, then, that in cosmology Evagrius took his foundation from Origen and that
he then elaborated that material on the basis of the theological formation that he had
received at the feet of the Cappadocian Fathers; on the basis of the oral teachings of the
Egyptian fathers that he met personally, including Didymus and the two Sts Makarios;[3] on
the basis of his own readings in other philosophers and theologians, including the Stoics,
Clement of Alexandria and, we think possible, Plotinus; and on the basis of his own personal
experience of ascesis in the Egyptian desert. He obviously was a very intelligent man, and he
was renowned, at least among his followers, for his charism of discernment.

As concerns his ascetical psychology, Evagrius does not seem to depend on Origen but on the
other sources named. To a great extent, however, in the higher stages of contemplation,
Evagrius has attempted to integrate his understanding of contemplation with his Origenist
cosmology.
A key difference between the Kephalaia Gnostica and Peri Archon is that Origen comes
across as a speculative thinker—as a speculative theologian—whereas Evagrius comes across
as a practising ascetic and mystic: Evagrius’ formulation of Origen is much more focused,
much more oriented to ascetical concerns, than we find in Peri Archon. This difference
permeates the whole of the Kephalaia Gnostica.

Moreover, Origen, at least as Rufinus presents him, draws a sketch of a system, and that
much more diffidently than Evagrius—if, indeed, Origen’s protestations that he is presenting
speculations for discussion only are not to be taken as interpolations by Rufinus. Evagrius
himself is outlining, even if in a deliberately obscure way, a highly articulated system, one
that he knows by experience to be true.[4] However, it is a system based on Peri Archon.

In Peri Archon, Origen’s sole sketch of a system of contemplation is given in the context of
the ascent of the soul after death. There is nothing in Peri Archon that corresponds to
Evagrius’ system of ascetical contemplation, which has direct roots in Clement of Alexandria
and which resembles Plotinus’ method in the Enneads. However, Origen’s sketch of the
contemplative ascent of the soul after death could well be taken to be a Platonic system of
contemplation transposed to the condition of the soul after death.

It would be outside the scope of this work to present a summary of the dogmatic teaching of
the Orthodox Church as a counterfoil to Evagrius’ own dogmatic positions. The reader
wishing such a summary of the dogmas of the Orthodox Church is referred to the Exact
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of St John of Damascus.[5]

Let us now look at the fifteen Anathemas directed against Origenism by the Fifth Ecumenical
Synod. This will enable us to isolate quite quickly the unacceptable parts of the system of
which we have just made a tour.

It is clear that the Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod were not concerned with
developing an Orthodox cosmology or anthropology or with producing a general dogmatic
treatise of any kind, or even with condemning the Kephalaia Gnostica per se. They were
faced with a concrete heretical movement in a specific time and place, and they were
concerned with combating that heretical movement. Hence, the Anathemas of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod are directed against a concrete historical movement, and they must be
read with that in mind; otherwise their content will be quite misunderstood. A very close
perusal of the Kephalaia Gnostica in conjunction with the Anathemas of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod makes that clear. Moreover, it should also be clear that since the
Anathemas are directed against a movement and not against a literary work per se, it is
possible for the Anathemas to present the Origenist doctrines somewhat differently from the
Kephalaia Gnostica. We will see a divergence on some minor points.

We follow the text of the Anathemas in Acta Conciliorvm Oecvmenicorvm.[6] It might be

remarked before we begin that if a person is ‘anathema’ he is accursed and hence
excommunicated—cut off from the Body of Christ.

[3] We are not suggesting that the two Sts Makarios were Origenists; we mean that in cosmology Evagrius was
influenced by the atmosphere of the Egyptian desert.

Chapter III -- 45

11 Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod

The Fifteen Canons of the Holy 165 Fathers of the Holy Fifth Synod in
Constantinople.

1 If anyone advocates the mythical pre-existence of souls and the monstrous

Restoration which follows it, let him be anathema.

This first Anathema hits the nail on the head. The pre-existence of souls—which, it is clear
from the subsequent Anathemas, the Synod understood to include the whole apparatus that
we have just seen in the Kephalaia Gnostica of the contemplation of the Unity, the
negligence, the Movement, the First Judgement and so on—and the Restoration—which, it is
equally clear from the subsequent Anathemas, the Synod understood to include the whole
apparatus of Evagrian eschatology—are at the root of the whole heresy of Evagrius.
We would like to remark here that when we prepared our presentation of the Kephalaia
Gnostica, we had not read the Anathemas in depth. We were struck, after having finished our
presentation of the Kephalaia Gnostica, by how closely the Anathemas followed the content
of the Kephalaia Gnostica. The reader in doubt about fine points, for example, of the
Evagrian doctrine of the Restoration can consult the Anathemas which follow as a guide to
the plain meaning of the Kephalaia Gnostica! There are certainly places where the
Kephalaia Gnostica and the Anathemas diverge; for the most part, however, they are very
close. We do not think the Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod were biased. They seemed
to have grasped a very difficult system quite well indeed.

2 If anyone says the creation of all the reasonable beings (logikon) to have
occurred [in such a way that all the reasonable beings were] bodiless and
immaterial minds (noas) without any number or name, so that there occurred
an henad (enas) of all of these in the identity of substance, power and
operation, and in both the union and the gnosis [of these minds] towards the
Word of God; these [minds (noas)] to have taken their satiety of the divine
contemplation and to have turned towards the worse according to the
proportion in each of its inclination towards the worse; and [these minds
(noas)] to have taken bodies more subtle or more gross and to have been
allotted a name, on account of the fact that the differences in the bodies of the
powers on high are just as the differences in their names; and, hence, [these
minds (noas)] both to have become and to have been named some Cherubim,
others Seraphim, others Principalities, Powers, Dominions, Thrones, Angels
and as many heavenly orders as exist, let him be anathema.

This is clearly a presentation of the Evagrian doctrine of the condition of the minds (noes) in
the contemplation of the Unity prior to the Movement, the negligence, the Movement, the
First Judgement, and the giving of bodies and worlds to the angelic powers. We did not see
in the Kephalaia Gnostica such a clear presentation of the doctrine that the minds (noes)
before the Movement existed in the state of the henad that Evagrius clearly teaches that they
are to have at the Restoration. This seems to be one place where either the Kephalaia
Gnostica is relatively silent or obscure. The Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod would
have been dealing with the doctrines of the Origenists as they encountered them in practice
and the doctrine may have been more clearly stated in the movement’s oral teaching. The
Fathers were there. The Fathers present what Evagrius calls the negligence of the minds
(noes) as the inclination of the minds (noes) towards the worse after they had taken their fill
of the divine contemplation. It is interesting that the Fathers view the contemplation that the
minds (noes) engaged in to be ‘the union and the gnosis towards the Word of God’. We have
already remarked that where Evagrius himself emphasizes the gnosis of the Unity, calling it
the Word of God, the Fathers emphasize the Word of God, largely but not entirely ignoring
the concept of the gnosis of the Unity. Moreover, the Fathers ignore the question whether in
the Origenist system the Christ was somehow distinguished from the other minds (noes) by
being united to the Word of God in a special way, or whether his lack of negligence in the
Movement was a matter of chance. However, they do emphasize their understanding of the
condition of the minds (noes) in the henad as including ‘the identity of substance, power and
operation’ among the minds (noes).

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which contain doctrines relative to this Anathema
include: III, 22; I, 49; I, 50; III, 45; VI, 75; II, 66; II, 76; II, 14; VI, 78; VI, 80; I, 63.

3 If anyone says the sun, the moon and the stars, themselves also being a part of
the same henad (enas) of reasonable beings, to have become whatever they are
from their deviation towards the worse, let him be anathema.

This is a clear condemnation of the doctrine based on Origen that we saw in the Kephalaia
Gnostica of the intelligent nature of the stars, that the stars—here also including the sun and
moon—are an order of angels.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: I, 63; VI,
88; III, 37; III, 84, IV 29, III 62.

4 If anyone says the reasonable beings which had cooled from the divine love to
have been clothed in grosser bodies of the type we have and to have been named
men; those, however, which had come to the extreme of evil to have been
clothed in cold and dark bodies, and both to be and to be called demons, or
spirits (pneumatika) of evil, let him be anathema.
This is a clear presentation of the rest of the First Judgement after the Movement, and of the
granting of bodies and worlds, that we have seen in the Kephalaia Gnostica, this time for
men and demons.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: I, 63; VI,
25.

5 If anyone says the soul (psuchike) state to come from the angelic and the
archangelic states; from the soul (psuches) [i.e. from the soul state], then, to
come the demonic and the human states; from the human state, then, again to
come angels and demons; and each order of the heavenly powers to be
constituted either entirely from those below or [entirely] from those above, or
from those above and those below, let him be anathema.

The first part of this Anathema is the first part of KG V, 11 verbatim; the second part is KG II,
78 verbatim.[1]

Here we see an important aspect of the relations among Evagrius, Origen and the Anathemas
of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. The Anathemas quote the version intégrale (S2) of the
Kephalaia Gnostica verbatim. Since that version is on the one hand in Syriac and on the
other hand corroborated in its readings by the fragments of the Greek original of the
Kephalaia Gnostica preserved in independent Greek authors, it cannot be thought to be a
fabrication. Hence, the Anathemas can be construed to refer directly to Origen’s writings
only if we assume that Evagrius was making direct quotations from those writings. But the
tone of the Kephalaia Gnostica is different from that of Peri Archon—as it has come down to
us, surely—: Origen nowhere in Peri Archon descends to the level of detail that we find in the
Kephalaia Gnostica. Nor do we think that it is typical of Evagrius to make direct quotations
from other authors. However, the basic outline of the cosmological doctrines of the
Kephalaia Gnostica is to be found in Peri Archon.

We want to say this: The Anathemas quote the Kephalaia Gnostica, which is itself based
indirectly on Peri Archon. That is, since the Anathemas are shown not to be fabricated out of
whole cloth by their extremely close fit with the Kephalaia Gnostica, they are speaking about
the real teachings of a real movement. We do not accept the assertion that the Anathemas
were due to the diktat of a despotic Byzantine emperor that the cowed Fathers of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod were powerless to resist. We dismiss the notion that Evagrius was
speaking metaphorically throughout the Kephalaia Gnostica and then misinterpreted by his
naïve followers; there is no evidence for such a theory. However, we do find the doctrines of
the Kephalaia Gnostica and perforce of the Anathemas in less-developed form in Rufinus’
translation of Peri Archon. Now while it might be thought that heretics had indeed tampered
with Origen’s original text of Peri Archon, and that the heretical passages which remained in
Rufinus’ translation had merely eluded Rufinus’ attention—and that all the negative
testimonies of St Jerome, the Emperor Justinian, St Epiphanios and others are fabrications
or exaggerations—, still that does not explain why the movement was called ‘Origenist’ and
not ‘Evagrian’ or even, since Didymus the Blind was Evagrius’ teacher, ‘Didyman’. Was
Origen’s name so great that there was anything to be gained by hiding behind it? The most
that exonerating Origen can do is create the following question: where did Evagrius Pontikos
get the cosmological doctrines that he espouses in the Kephalaia Gnostica? Moreover, if
Origen’s original text of Peri Archon had been tampered with, would not someone other than
Rufinus have pointed that out? For before the Fifth Ecumenical Synod there must have been
extant authentic copies of Peri Archon. Surely the Fathers in Palestine were not so naïve as
not to have picked up an authentic copy of the work and studied it!

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: V, 11; II,
78; VI, 77; I, 11.

6 If anyone says the species of demons to be called double, being gathered

together from human souls and from superior [i.e. angelic] spirits which have
fallen into this state; a single mind (nous) out of the whole supposed henad
(enas) of reasonable beings to remain motionless in regard to the divine love
and contemplation; that mind (nous), having become Christ and king of all the
reasonable beings, to produce the whole corporeal nature, the heaven and the
earth and all that is in between; and that the world, having subsistent elements
more ancient than its own existence, the dry, the wet, the hot and the cold, and
the form according to which it was modelled, thus has come to be; and that not
the All-Holy and Consubstantial Trinity created the world—and on account of
that [creation by the Trinity] the world is created—but the mind (nous), whom
they say, demiurge (demiourgikos) existing before the world and furnishing
being to the world itself, has shown [the world to be] created, let him be
anathema.

We did not see in the Kephalaia Gnostica an explicit doctrine that there were two sources of
demons, the superior spirits and the human souls, although the doctrine that the minds
(noes) which are reduced to the soul state become either men or demons is clearly stated.

We did not see in the Kephalaia Gnostica the pre-existence of elements that the Evagrian
Christ used to make the worlds. Possibly this was an oral teaching of the Origenists, one of
the matters that Evagrius avoided stating openly in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

It is quite possible, however, that this statement that the Christ is a demiurge who makes the
world from previously subsistent elements and from a previously subsistent form in fact
refers to what we have seen in the Kephalaia Gnostica: according to Evagrius, the Christ
makes use of a certain contemplation in making the bodies and the worlds, just as the Father
in the beginning makes use of a certain contemplation in making the reasonable beings, the
minds (noes). In other words, the Synod might be interpreting the Evagrian doctrine of the
creation of the bodies and the worlds by the Christ by means of the second natural
contemplation not as a doctrine of creation ex nihilo by means of a certain contemplation,
but as a doctrine of creation by the Christ out of a pre-existing form and elements. The
question would arise: was it that the Fathers did not grasp the Evagrian ontology; or had the
doctrine evolved among the Origenists that the Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod
encountered in practice into the form given by the Fathers; or, in fact, is the Synod giving the
proper interpretation of the doctrine in the Kephalaia Gnostica of the use by the Christ of
the second natural contemplation for the creation of the bodies and the worlds? We do not
know. Needless to say, we submit to the judgement of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. In fact, it
seems very likely that the Fathers are presenting the doctrine as it was understood by the
Origenists whom they encountered. It seems to us, moreover, that the Evagrian doctrine of
the use by the Christ of the second natural contemplation to create the bodies and the worlds
cannot itself be considered sound in any event. It certainly is not a doctrine that we have
encountered anywhere else.
The Synod again does not address the question of whether the Evagrian Christ was by
chance the sole mind (nous) not to have deviated from contemplation of the Unity during the
Movement, or whether that mind (nous) which became the Christ was in fact from the
genesis of the minds (noes) distinguished in some fashion from the other minds (noes) by its
manner of union with the Word of God.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: IV, 58; III,
26; IV, 7; V, 11.

7 If anyone says the so-called Christ to exist in the form of God and, having been
united to the Word of God before all the Ages, in the last days to empty himself
towards the human state, having had pity, as they say, on the multifarious fall
which occurred to those who belonged to the same henad (enas); and, wishing
to bring them back, to have been through all [the worlds] and to have clothed
himself with various bodies and to have been allotted [various] names, having
become all things to all, angel among the angels but also Power among the
Powers; and in the other orders or kinds of reasonable beings to have been
transformed harmoniously to each order or kind; and then in a way similar to
us to have participated in flesh and blood and also to have become man for
men; and does not confess the Word of God to have emptied himself and to
have become man, let him be anathema.

This is a direct condemnation of the Evagrian Christology that we saw in the Kephalaia
Gnostica. The Fathers present a clear summary of the rather veiled presentation by Evagrius
of the incarnation of the Evagrian Christ into all the orders of bodies that exist after the
Movement and the First Judgement. It is clear from the Kephalaia Gnostica, however, that
Evagrius understands that the Christ is at the same time an angel to the angels, a Power to
the Powers and, after his incarnation into a human body, a man to men. This is what
underlies KG VI, 16: despite this multiplicity there is only one Christ. Moreover, here, the
Fathers address the central Christological heresy of Evagrius: according to the Kephalaia
Gnostica, it is not the Word of God which has incarnated into human flesh, but a certain
mind (nous) united from its genesis to the Word of God.
The Fathers refer to the Evagrian doctrine that the Christ is a mind (nous) united to the
Word of God ‘before all the Ages’. However, again, they do not address the point whether in
the Evagrian system this distinguished the Christ from all the other minds (noes), or whether
all the minds (noes) are to be understood as having existed in an equal union, so that in the
contemplation of the Unity, the immutability of the Christ in contradistinction to the
negligence of the other minds (noes) could be seen as something that happened by chance.
In the latter case, it would be conceivable in the Evagrian system that another mind (nous) or
minds (noes) might have continued in the contemplation of the Unity just as the Evagrian
Christ did, whereas the mind (nous) that became the Evagrian Christ might have
participated in the negligence.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: II, 24; III,
2; VI, 14; IV, 9; VI, 16; V, 1; VI, 18; V, 48; VI, 79; IV, 41; VI, 77; VI, 56; VI, 57; VI, 33.

8 If anyone does not say that the Word of God, he who is consubstantial to God
and to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, he who became flesh and became man,
he who is one of the Holy Trinity, is properly the Christ, but in an improper
sense on account of the mind (nous) which, as they say, emptied itself as being
united to the very Word of God and properly called the Christ; but that that one
[i.e. the Word] on account of this one [i.e. the nous] is the Christ, and this one
[i.e. the nous] on account of that one [i.e. the Word of God] is God, let him be
anathema.

We admit to finding the formulation that Evagrius uses in KG IV, 18 a bit confusing. Here,
the Fathers quote that formulation verbatim without simplifying it. It is worthwhile here to
quote KG IV, 18:

18 The intelligible unction is the spiritual gnosis of the Holy Unity, and the Christ is he who is united to
this gnosis. And if that is so, the Christ is not the Word in the beginning, so that he who has been
anointed is not God in the beginning, but that one [i.e. the Word of God] on account of this one [i.e. the
Christ] is the Christ, and this one [i.e. the Christ] on account of that one [i.e. the Word of God] is God.
Evagrius here says that the Christ is not the Word of God and therefore not God; but that the
Christ is a (created) mind (nous) that is united to the gnosis of the Holy Unity (which gnosis
is to be identified with the Word of God); that the Word of God is the Christ on account of
the Christ (on account of its union with the Christ); and that the (created) mind (nous) which
is the Christ is God on account of the Word of God (on account of its union with the Word of
God).

The Christological doctrine that the Anathema is addressing is this: The created mind (nous)
which in the Movement remained unmoved in its contemplation of the Unity is the Christ.
That created mind (nous), the Christ, is not the Word in the beginning, so it is not God in the
beginning. However, that mind (nous) is anointed with (i.e. endued with, united to) the
spiritual gnosis of the Unity, which gnosis is to be identified with the Word of God. The Word
of God is not properly the Christ, the created mind (nous) we have just spoken of. However,
in an improper sense it is the Christ on account of the union between it and the created mind
(nous) which is the Christ, which union is constituted from the spiritual gnosis of the Unity
that the created mind (nous) called the Christ has. Moreover, in the opposite direction, that
anointing, equivalent to the union of that created mind (nous) with the Word of God, makes
that created mind in an improper sense God. This is the key doctrine that the Anathema is
combating: it is not the Word of God which is properly the Christ, but the created mind
(nous) which in the Movement remained unmoved in its contemplation of the Unity; the
Word of God, which itself did not incarnate into human flesh, is the Christ in an improper
sense on account of the union between it and that created mind (nous) which is properly the
Christ and which did incarnate into human flesh.

The phrase in Anathema 8 concerning the mind (nous), ‘the mind (nous) which, as they say,
emptied itself as being united to the very Word of God and properly called the Christ’, is to
be understood in the same way as Anathema 7; it is a reference to Evagrius’ doctrine of the
emptying or kenosis of the created mind (nous) called the Christ in its multi-stage
incarnation as outlined in detail in Anathema 7 and referred to again in passing in Anathema
12. It does not refer to a ‘divine “kenotic nous” (kenosanta eauton noun) which effects
Christ’s “spiritual anointing”’, as Fr Dysinger would have it.[2] Hence we do not accept Fr
Dysinger’s argument: ‘Thus, although anathema 8 of 553 may well contain a citation from
the Kephalaia Gnostica, it cannot be regarded as solely, or even as primarily directed against
Evagrius, since the majority of the anathema describes a doctrine which Evagrius did not
teach.’[3] Fr Dysinger is referring to the ‘divine “kenotic nous” (kenosanta eauton noun)
which effects Christ’s “spiritual anointing”’ as the doctrine which is being attacked by the
Anathema and which was not taught by Evagrius. The doctrine certainly was not taught by
Evagrius, but neither is it the meaning of the Anathema.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: IV, 18; VI,
14; IV, 9; VI, 18; V, 48; VI, 79.

9 If anyone says that it is not the Word of God, having become flesh in a flesh
ensouled by a reasonable and spiritual soul (psuche logike kai noera), who has
descended to Hades and has himself again ascended to Heaven, but the mind
(nous) spoken of among them, whom, speaking impiously, they say to be
properly the Christ, having been made so by the gnosis of the Unity, let him be
anathema.

Here, regarding the Evagrian Christ, the Fathers do refer to the ‘gnosis of the Unity’ rather
than to the union with the Word of God. It is interesting and important that they understand
that it is the gnosis of the Unity which has made the Christ the Christ.

Concerning the descent into Hades, it is clear that this Anathema is taken directly from KG
IV, 80.

Note that ‘reasonable and intelligent soul’ corresponds to ‘psuche logike kai noera’ in the
original Greek. This is a phrase we find in St Gregory of Nyssa, St Maximos the Confessor
and St John of Damascus.[4] It seems to be a standard technical theological expression for
the nature of the human soul and for the nature of Christ’s own soul.

The one chapter of the Kephalaia Gnostica which pertains to this Anathema is IV, 80.

10 If anyone says that the body of the Lord after the Resurrection was ethereal,
and spherical in shape; and that of such a kind will also be the bodies of the
others [i.e. all men] after the [General] Resurrection; and that, the Lord
himself first putting off his very own body, then similarly the nature of the
bodies of all [the resurrected] will go towards non-existence, let him be
anathema.

We have already seen this doctrine in the Kephalaia Gnostica. This Anathema in fact
clarifies the sequence of events in the Evagrian eschatology that we ourselves could not quite
disentangle. The General Resurrection and the acquisition of a spiritual body is an
intermediate stage, to be followed in the Evagrian system by the putting off of bodies—first
by the Christ, a detail we did not discern in the text of the Kephalaia Gnostica—and by the
return of the now-naked minds (noes) to the contemplation of the Unity.

It is true, however, that the floor-plan of Evagrius’ eschatology can be found in Peri Archon,
so that it cannot automatically be said that on eschatology the Anathemas are following
Evagrius. Other proofs have to be adduced, such as the direct quotations from the Kephalaia
Gnostica that we have already seen in the Anathemas.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: IV, 23; IV,
24; VI, 56; VI, 58; V, 8; II, 77; V, 89; I, 24; I, 26; I, 54; I, 58; I, 90; II, 62; II, 90; III, 9; III, 15;
III, 25; III, 40; III, 47; III, 51; III, 66; III, 68; IV, 39; V, 19; VI, 23; VI, 34.

11 If anyone says that the judgement to come signifies the complete destruction
of bodies; and that the end of that about which the myth is made is the
immaterial nature; and that in the [world] to come there will exist nothing of
those things which are material; but that the mind (nous) will be naked, let him
be anathema.

We have seen this doctrine clearly expressed in various chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: III, 6; III,
70; I, 7; I, 8; I, 9; I, 15; I, 16; I, 17; I, 20; I, 24; I, 26; I, 52; I, 54; I, 58; II, 50; II, 62; III, 9; III,
15; III, 66; III, 68; VI, 34.
12 If anyone says that the heavenly powers and all men and the Devil and the
spirits [pneumatika] of evil will be united to the Word of God in exactly the
same way as that very mind (nous) which is by them called the Christ and which
exists in the form of God and which, as they say, emptied itself; and that there
will be an end of the kingdom of Christ, let him be anathema.

We have seen these doctrines clearly expressed in a number of chapters of the Kephalaia
Gnostica.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which are relevant to this Anathema include: VI, 57; VI,
27; VI, 33; VI, 89; I, 18; I, 20; II, 26; III, 9; IV, 34; IV, 51.

13 If anyone says that the Christ will have absolutely no difference from any one
at all of the reasonable beings, neither in substance, nor in gnosis, nor in power
or operations over all, but all will be at the right hand of God, like him who
among them is the Christ, in the same way that they happened to be in the pre-
existence concerning which they make myths, let him be anathema.

This Anathema addresses yet another aspect of the Restoration, one which we have seen
clearly expressed in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which pertain to this Anathema include: VI, 89; I, 7; I, 8;
I, 9; I, 20; I, 24; I, 54; IV, 51; VI, 34.

14 If anyone says that all the reasonable beings will be a single henad (enas), the
persons (hupostases) and the numbers being destroyed together with the
bodies; that to the gnosis concerning the reasonable beings follow the
destruction of worlds, the deposition of bodies and the <destruction> of names;
<and> that there will be identity of gnosis just as also of persons (hupostases);
and that in the Restoration about which they make myths, <the minds (noas)>
will only be naked just as they also happened to be in the pre-existence which is
raved about among them, let him be anathema.[5]
This Anathema discusses yet another aspect of the Restoration that we found in many
chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica. It quotes KG II, 17 verbatim.

Note that the Anathema condemns the doctrine that in the Restoration, in the henad, ‘the
persons (hupostases)’ will be destroyed together with the bodies. Anathema 2 does not use
that term in reference to the condition of the minds (noes) before the Movement. The
Fathers of the Synod clearly understood the doctrine that they were condemning to be that in
the Restoration there would be no personal distinctions among the minds (noes). By
implication (see Anathema 15), they also understood that this was taught to be the condition
of the minds (noes) in the henad before the Movement. These doctrines are not so clearly
taught in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which pertain to this Anathema include: II, 17; II, 62; II,
67; III, 66; III, 68; IV, 51; VI, 34; VI, 89; I, 7; I, 8; I, 9; I, 15; I, 16; I, 17; I, 20; I, 24; I, 26; I,
52; I, 54; I, 58; II, 25; II, 49; II, 50.

15 If anyone says that the very comportment of the minds (noes) will be the
same as that which they had previously, when they had not yet descended or
fallen, so that the beginning is the same as the end and the end is the measure of
the beginning, let him be anathema.

This, the final Anathema, completes the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod with yet
another aspect of the Restoration that we found in the Kephalaia Gnostica.

Chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which pertain to this Anathema include: III, 68; III, 66;
VI, 34; I, 40; I, 7; I, 8; I, 9; I, 18; I, 20; I, 24; I, 26.

[1] With allowances for the translation of the Kephalaia Gnostica from the Syriac and French. However, for KG V, 11,
see the Greek fragment given in a footnote to the chapter in Appendix 2 of Volume II.

[5] The emendations in this Anathema are by the editors of the Greek text of the Anathemas
 Chapter III -- 46

It is clear that the version intégrale (S2) of the Kephalaia Gnostica is an excellent witness to
the Origenism that was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. If we accept the
hypothesis of Professor Guillaumont, which we do, that the version intégrale (S2) is in fact
the sole authentic witness to the original Greek text of the Kephalaia Gnostica, then it must
be concluded with Professor Guillaumont that Evagrius Pontikos was the author of the
Origenism condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. For the differences that we have seen
above between the Anathemas and the Kephalaia Gnostica are minor, more a matter of
interpretation than of a divergence on matters of import.

It is clear that although the Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod were speaking to the
Origenism of their time and not to the Kephalaia Gnostica taken as a literary work, the
Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod are very closely allied to the content of the
Kephalaia Gnostica. In fact, literarily speaking, the Anathemas are a witness to the
interpretation of the Kephalaia Gnostica, precisely in cases where the global meaning of a
set of highly obscure chapters is in doubt, as we found to be the case in the matter of the
Evagrian eschatology. One can use the Anathemas to sort out the temporal sequence of
events in Evagrian eschatology in a way that remains problematical when one confronts only
the collection of chapters on the subject. We do not think that this value is reduced by the
Anathemas’ being a ‘hostile witness’. They certainly are a hostile witness, but their
presentation of the doctrines they condemn is so close to the content of the Kephalaia
Gnostica that they cannot be considered to be a malicious distortion of the Evagrian system;
and they can therefore be used to shed light on how the more obscure passages of the
Kephalaia Gnostica are to be combined into a coherent system.

In certain cases the Anathemas provide details that we did not discern in the text of the
Kephalaia Gnostica, but, we think, those were probably details that the Fathers of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod had learned from their immediate environment, since many of them had
been living in the midst of Origenists. In fact, there is evidence that the Fathers had before
them a summary of Origenist teaching prepared by Abbot Conon of the Laura of St Savas at
Jerusalem.[1]
The reader will have of course noticed that the above anathemas do not mention Origen,
Didymus the Blind and Evagrius Pontikos by name. Were these three men condemned by
name by the Synod? It is in scholarly dispute whether Origen, Didymus the Blind and
Evagrius were actually condemned by name by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod; however, the
explicit reaffirmations by the Sixth and Seventh Ecumenical Synods both of the anathemas
against Origenism and of the condemnations by name of these three persons render such a
scholarly dispute moot.[2]

It is useful to ask the following question: what did the Fathers of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod
not anathematize, and why not? Of course, this is a rhetorical question, since we will never
know why the Fathers were silent about certain matters.

The Anathemas say nothing about the Trinitarian theology of Evagrius, or, more generally, of
the Origenist movement. Even if the matter is left obscure in the Kephalaia Gnostica, there
are quite unorthodox views expressed in the Letter to Melania. Indeed, that makes us
wonder if the Letter is authentic: if it is, then it must not have played a very important role in
the Origenist movement: the Anathemas do not refer to doctrines of the Letter which cannot
be found in the Kephalaia Gnostica, whereas they do refer quite explicitly to doctrines of the
Kephalaia Gnostica. This accords with what we already know: the Kephalaia Gnostica was
in Palestine the central text of the Origenists; this can be inferred, for example, from the fact
that one of St Barsanuphios’ answers is to a monk disturbed by reading the Kephalaia
Gnostica.[3]

To return to the matter of Trinitarian theology, Origen’s subordinationism in Trinitarian

theology was already an issue at the time of Patriarch Theophilos of Alexandria at the end of
the Fourth Century. Evidently, the issue was not so clear-cut or so central to the Origenist
heresy as the Fathers found it in their own time as to warrant explicit condemnation.

Nothing is said about the very strange doctrines that the Holy Trinity is essential gnosis, that
God made use of a certain contemplation to create the minds (noes) and that the Evagrian
Christ made use of a certain contemplation as if it were a substance or power in order to
create the worlds, unless it be in the form that is given in Anathema 6. We think that the
Fathers must have felt that they had covered the matter sufficiently in Anathema 6: the
doctrines are very obscurely expressed, and among the Origenists the Fathers encountered in
practice, they may not have been expressed with any greater clarity.

Nothing is said explicitly about the Evagrian doctrine of reincarnation, although the doctrine
of the mobility of the minds (noes) among the orders of archangels, angels, men and demons
is addressed. It seems that the Fathers pursued conciseness in the Anathemas; that is most
likely why they quote certain key passages of Evagrius verbatim. However, the Council in
Trullo explicitly interprets the Origenism condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod to
include a doctrine of reincarnation.[4]

Nothing is said about Evagrius’ ascetical psychology, about the concept of dispassion
(apatheia), about the reasons (logoi) of existent things that can be contemplated, about the
contemplation of angels and their reasons (logoi), about spiritual senses, about the
contemplation of God. The Anathemas are concerned with cosmological doctrines, not with
ascetical or contemplative psychology. As we have already remarked, Evagrius’ cosmological
doctrines depend directly on Origen whereas his ascetical and contemplative doctrines have
their roots in Clement of Alexandria and in the Cappadocians—and, of course, in the Fathers
of the Egyptian desert. However, the influence of Evagrius’ cosmology on his higher
contemplative psychology cannot be ignored.

What we want to take from the Kephalaia Gnostica is the following: To understand the texts
of Evagrius that we shall deal with in Volume II, we must understand the Evagrian
distinction between mind (nous) and soul (psuche). We will discuss this matter further in
Section 13, below.

We want to accept the Evagrian doctrine of praktike. This, in our view, is the theory of
asceticism that forms the basis of the doctrine of sobriety of St Hesychios in On Sobriety, the
key text for the theory of Hesychasm that we shall analyse in Volume III of this work. We
shall also need to understand Evagrius’ doctrine of dispassion (apatheia), since it is so
closely tied to his doctrine of praktike, although we shall have to modify it slightly to fit an
Orthodox anthropology. Of course, we accept these doctrines stripped of Evagrius’ heretical
cosmological speculations, treating the doctrines as matters of ascetical theory.
We want to accept Evagrius’ ascetical psychology. This is Evagrius’ great contribution to
ascetical theory, a contribution that spread throughout Christendom, both East and West.

We will find that St Hesychios accepts the broad outline of the Evagrian theory of
contemplation, but stripped of its heretical eschatological and cosmological trappings. We
will find that this is true even of St Maximos the Confessor. This theory of contemplation is
the doctrine of the four transformations that we have already seen; we will discuss these
transformations in detail in Volume II in the Digression on the Evagrian doctrine of
contemplation. Hence, we want to retain the broad outline of the Evagrian theory of
contemplation and, especially, the Evagrian psychology of contemplation.

This psychology of contemplation, which forms the basis or presupposition of the Evagrian
theory of ascesis or praktike—for if praktike is a road somewhere, the goal must be
presupposed in the definition of the road—, is discussed at the end of On the Thoughts,
which we analyse in Volume II. When we reach that point we will introduce, in the
Digression on the Evagrian theory of contemplation, material from the Kephalaia Gnostica
that concerns the Evagrian theories of praktike, contemplation and gnosis, material that for
the most part we have not presented in this chapter. That material will be used to clarify the
very concise presentation of the psychology of contemplation that is found in the last
chapters of On the Thoughts. This presentation will set the stage for our analysis of On
Sobriety in Volume III. For St Hesychios builds on the foundation of the Evagrian theory of
ascesis—praktike—and on the Evagrian theory and psychology of contemplation.

We need to accept the practical aspects of the Evagrian demonology, for those are connected
to Evagrius’ ascetical psychology, or psychology of praktike. Of course, we discard the
condemned cosmological aspects of this demonology, those that have to do with the
provenance of demons and their ultimate fate, and their potential to become angels in
subsequent ‘incarnations’ or even to participate with the rest of the minds (noes) in the
contemplation of the Unity in the Restoration.

[2] The Sixth Ecumenical Synod pronounced as follows:

 Wherefore this our holy and Ecumenical Synod having driven away the impious
error which had prevailed for a certain time until now, and following closely the
straight path of the holy and approved Fathers, has piously given its full assent
to the five holy and Ecumenical Synods, that is to say, to that of … the Fifth holy
Synod assembled in this place, against Theodore of Mopsuestia, Origen,
Didymus, and Evagrius ….

(From: Acts, Session XVIII, Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, Tom. VI., col. 1019.

See: www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-14/Npnf2-14-128.htm#TopOfPage.)

The Decree of the Seventh:

Moreover, with these [i.e. previous Ecumenical Synods] we anathematize the

fables of Origen, Evagrius, and Didymus, in accordance with the decision of the
Fifth Council held at Constantinople.

(From: Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, Tom. VII., col. 552.

See: www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-14/Npnf2-14-165.htm#P10287_1959698.)

Letter of the Seventh to the Emperor and Empress:

We have also anathematized the idle tales of Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius….

(From: Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, Tom. VII., col. 577.

See: www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-14/Npnf2-14-135.htm#P5996_1343778.)

[3] Barsanuphios Question 600, Volume III.

[4] The Council in Trullo:

Also we recognize as inspired by the Spirit the pious voices of the one hundred
and sixty-five God-bearing fathers who assembled in this imperial city in the
time of our Emperor Justinian of blessed memory, and we teach them to those
who come after us; for these synodically anathematized and execrated … Origen,
and Didymus, and Evagrius, all of whom reintroduced feigned Greek myths, and
brought back again the circlings of certain bodies and souls, and deranged
turnings [or transmigrations [note in original]] to the wanderings or dreamings
of their minds, and impiously insulting the resurrection of the dead.

Chapter III -- 47

12 Return to St Gregory of Nyssa

Let us now turn to a fundamental issue. In Chapter II, above, we stopped discussing St
Gregory of Nyssa and St Macrina when they had finished developing an Orthodox
psychology tied to an Orthodox anthropology. That Orthodox psychology included a
tripartite division of the soul that Evagrius himself uses in the Kephalaia Gnostica. We will
in fact use this tripartite division of the soul, for in Volume II we will find it to be used by
Evagrius in his ascetical works and, in Volume III, to be used by St Hesychios. But we now
want to complete a delineation of Orthodox anthropology in answering such questions as the
following: If souls do not pre-exist, where did they and do they come from? What is the
connection between soul and mind? However, there is one topic we must address before
that. That is the matter of the Origenism of St Gregory of Nyssa.

For the attentive reader will have discerned the following: In On the Soul and the
Resurrection, St Gregory of Nyssa presents his sister, St Macrina, as defining an Orthodox
anthropology which has the following characteristics. The soul is intelligible. The soul is
incomprehensible in its essence, just as God is. The mind (nous) is the image of God. The
soul is tripartite, being composed of mind (nous), the irascible part (thumos) and desire
(epithumia). The mind (nous) is that which is distinctively human. The irascible part
(thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) are part of man’s animal nature and are not
intrinsically part of the image of God, the mind (nous). It is the use by deliberate choice that
a man makes of the impulses found in the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part
(epithumia) that constitutes virtue or vice in man. But these are precisely positions of
Evagrius that we have explicitly seen in the Kephalaia Gnostica. There is a partial exception
with the Nyssian proposition that the mind (nous) is that which is distinctively human, since
Evagrius makes all angels, men and demons to be exactly the same sort of mind (nous).
However Evagrius does explicitly say that the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part
(epithumia) are what man has taken up from the animal nature.

The question therefore arises: Are these propositions of On the Soul and the Resurrection
Origenist? Is the whole theory of man in On the Soul and the Resurrection Origenist? Are we
fooling the reader in calling this anthropology the anthropology of the Orthodox Church?

We think the matter is otherwise. The Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod nowhere
address the points that we have just mentioned. Indeed, we think that the Fathers of the
Fifth Ecumenical Synod would have considered it preposterous to condemn such
propositions. These propositions were part of the received anthropology of the Orthodox
Church (they are already to be found in large part in Clement of Alexandria), and the heresy
of Evagrius did not lie in them, but in the propositions that the Fathers did condemn. That is,
the heresy of Evagrius is not that the mind (nous) is intelligible, that the mind (nous) is
incomprehensible just as God is incomprehensible, that the mind (nous) of man is the image
of God in man and that the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) are not
intrinsically part of that image of God but were added to man in some way from the nature of
the animals, and that the use by deliberate choice of the tendencies found in those two parts
of the soul is constitutive of virtue or vice in man.

So how did St Macrina, St Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius Pontikos all come to have the same
basic understanding of the matters that we have just outlined, if it is not the case that
Evagrius took them from Origen and that St Gregory of Nyssa took them from Origen,
presenting them as his sister, St Macrina’s, ideas?

First of all, we have already seen that Origen, as Rufinus presents him in Peri Archon, rejects
the tripartite soul. That doctrine, although Platonic in origin, cannot be labelled Origenist. It
is found, however, in Clement of Alexandria.[1]
Some of the verbal formulations by Evagrius in the Kephalaia Gnostica of the propositions
in question are so close to the verbal formulations of St Gregory of Nyssa in On the Soul and
the Resurrection that we ourselves think that they were matters that had been discussed
among the Cappadocians prior to Evagrius’ departure from Constantinople. For in
Constantinople, he was the Archdeacon of St Gregory the Theologian. Evagrius himself says
that St Gregory the Theologian was his teacher who taught him the rudiments of theology. In
fact, in Chapter 89 of the Treatise on the Practical Life, Evagrius explicitly says ‘Since,
according to our wise teacher, the rational soul is composed of three parts…’, and it is to be
understood that he is referring to St Gregory the Theologian, for in Chapter 44 of the
Gnostic, in a parallel passage, he refers explicitly to St Gregory. Hence, Evagrius would have
left Constantinople having had a formation in theology, which would have included a
discussion of the nature of the human soul. His heresy lies in what he did afterwards in
building on the formation he received from the Cappadocian Fathers. For what can be
discerned in the Evagrian system is an expansion of the basic anthropological ideas we have
just mentioned in the directions of the pre-existence and of the Restoration—Origenist ideas
surely—and the development of a very complicated and elaborate version of the pre-
existence and Restoration. These are precisely the two doctrines with which the Fathers of
the Fifth Ecumenical Synod commence their Anathemas. Moreover, that aspect of Evagrius’
ascetical psychology which complicates matters is the passions of man of man, a doctrine
which seems closely connected to the doctrine, clearly found in Rufinus’ translation of Peri
Archon, of the double descent of the mind (nous), first to become an unembodied soul and
then to become a soul incarnated in a body, a doctrine not to our knowledge to be found in
the writings of the Cappadocian Fathers.

St Gregory of Nyssa is a Father of the Church. His feast day is the Tenth of January. He was
named ‘Father of Fathers’ by the Seventh Ecumenical Synod. Despite that, he is often taxed
with being an Origenist, and in fact he himself espoused a doctrine of the Restoration,
although, as far as we ourselves have seen in his Greater Catechism, with nowhere near the
elaboration of Evagrius. But the doctrine of the Restoration has been explicitly condemned
by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod. So how is St Gregory of Nyssa a Father of the Church, how
are we presenting his anthropology as the anthropology of the Orthodox Church, and how
did he come to espouse the Restoration as a doctrine?
St Barsanuphios, that beacon of Orthodox discernment, responds to just such a question,
one, indeed, that refers explicitly to St Gregory of Nyssa and to his espousal of the doctrine of
the Restoration, a question that also remarks the restricted nature of the Nyssian doctrine of
the Restoration in comparison to the Evagrian doctrine, a very serious issue in St
Barsanuphios’ time and place, a question that centres on the problem: how can such a saint
make such an error? Both the question and St Barsanuphios’ answer are quite long.
Moreover, we are unaware, unfortunately, of an English translation of St Barsanuphios that
covers Questions 600 through 604. So we are left with presenting a brief summary. The
question is Number 604. The answer, which St Barsanuphios says he received, after he had
prayed for divine illumination on the subject, by divine revelation three days before the
questioner posed his question in writing is this: No saint is immune from error; no saint has
all the charisms of the Holy Spirit; and no saint has the depth of the wisdom of God. For the
Apostle says that ‘We know in part and we prophesy in part.’[2] Continuing, St Barsanuphios
says:

Taking pains therefore on their own initiative to become teachers or being

obliged by men to come to that, they [i.e. these saints] progressed greatly, even
beyond their teachers, and having received spiritual enlightenment composed
new dogmas. They remained at the same time, however, in possession of the
traditions of their teachers, lessons which were not sound. And after that,
progressing and becoming spiritual teachers, they did not pray to God
concerning their teachers, whether through the Holy Spirit those things had
been spoken which had been spoken by them, but viewing them as wise men and
men of spiritual knowledge [literally, gnostics], they did not discern their
teachers’ words. And, so, the teachings of their teachers were mixed with their
own teachings, and they spoke at one time, then, from the teaching that they had
learned from them, at another time, then, from the brilliance of their own
minds, and thus, then, in their names were written their words. For taking from
others and progressing and improving, they spoke through the Holy Spirit, if
they were illumined by it with something, and they spoke from the lessons of
their teachers who were before them, not discerning the words, whether they
themselves were obliged to be illumined by God through prayer and supplication
whether these things were true. And the teachings were mixed together, and,
since they were spoken by them, they were written in their name.[3]
In other words, with respect to a saint such as St Gregory of Nyssa, it must be understood
that in the case of an error such as the retention of the Origenist teaching of the Restoration
of All Things, St Gregory, otherwise progressing greatly and speaking with the illumination
of the Holy Spirit, accepted the teaching of his teachers uncritically and did not discern that
he ought to pray to God for enlightenment whether those teachings of his teachers were true
or not. St Barsanuphios does not explain if the teacher in question could be a writer, such as
Origen, who had since died, or else is to be understood to be some living teacher of a St
Gregory of Nyssa or of some other saint who would have transmitted the Origenist teaching
to St Gregory of Nyssa or to the other saint. It probably does not make any difference.

That still leaves the question, however: is the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa, whether
speaking in the name of St Macrina or in his own name—for the anthropology in On the
Making of Man, written in St Gregory of Nyssa’s own name, is no different from the
anthropology in On the Soul and the Resurrection—the teaching of the Orthodox Church?

This is a difficult question, for today in the West, in Orthodox circles, the anthropology of St
Gregory of Nyssa is out of fashion. The rather striking emphasis of St Gregory of Nyssa on
the intelligible nature of the soul in opposition to the material body is seen either as a Greek
legacy of Platonism or as a direct remnant of Origenism in the Church. However, it must be
understood that St Maximos the Confessor accepted the Nyssian anthropology.[4] Moreover,
as we have discussed in Chapter I, attempts to avoid the intelligible nature of the soul
founder on the difficulties encountered with the concept of the immortality of a soul that is
either a part of the body or the functioning of a part of the body. One cannot avoid the plain
fact of the Christian Faith: when the body dies, the soul does not. There are some aspects of
the Christian and Orthodox Faith that are difficult to espouse in a highly secularized world.
One of them is that man is more than material.

[4] The interested reader can refer to Chapter 1, A of the doctoral dissertation of the present Bishop of Pristina,
Artemios, on the soteriological doctrine of St Maximos (Artemios), to verify this

Chapter III -- 48

Let us now turn to substantive issues in anthropology.

The first question with which we wish to deal is this: If souls did not and do not pre-exist
where did they and do they come from?

St Gregory of Nyssa deals with this problem in his work, On the Making of Man. As we have
already mentioned, St Gregory wrote this work to complete the Hexaemeron of his brother,
St Basil the Great, who had died before its completion, interrupting it at the making of man.

In Chapter 16 of On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa addresses the account of the
creation of man in Genesis:

And God said, Let us make man according to our image and likeness; and let
them rule over the fish of the seas and the birds of Heaven and the animals and
the whole earth and all the creeping creatures that creep upon the earth. And
God made the man; in the image of God he made him; male and female he made
them.[1]

After considering the passage in Gen. 1, 26, ‘Let us make man according to our image and
likeness,’ St Gregory considers the passage in Gen. 1, 27: ‘And God made the man; in the
image of God he made him; male and female he made them.’ He asserts that the latter
passage is to be construed as two separate sentences, as follows: ‘And God made the man; in
the image of God he made him. Male and female he made them.’ This, St Gregory says,
reflects the double character of the creation of man.

The first sentence reflects the creation of the whole human nature in the image of God. As St
Gregory writes in On the Making of Man:

What then is it that we have thought concerning these things? The narrative, in saying ‘God made man’
shows the whole human nature by the indefiniteness of the meaning. For Adam has not yet been named
together with the creature, as the narrative goes on to say in the following, but the appellation in the
man which has been created is not that of a certain man but that of the universal human nature.
Therefore we are led by the universal naming of the nature to understand something of this sort, that by
the divine foreknowledge and power all the human race is contained in the first making. For it is
necessary to think that nothing is indefinite for God in those things which have been done by him, but
that there is a limit and measure of each of the beings, measured about by the wisdom of the Creator.
 Therefore, just as any man is circumscribed by the quantity which is in the body, and the measure for
him of his hypostasis is the quantity which is constituted together by the surface of the body, thus I
think that all the fullness of the human race was included by God, by the power of foreknowledge, as if
in the one body and that this is what the narrative teaches which says: ‘And God made the man;
according to the image of God he made him.’ For the image is not in a part of the nature, neither the
grace in a certain one of those things which are viewed in the nature, but the power of such a kind as this
passes through the whole of the race. A sign of this, then, is that the mind (nous) is established in all
men in like manner: all have the power to think and to deliberate beforehand, and all the other things by
means of which the Divine Nature is represented in that which has come to be according to it. Similarly,
the man manifested with the first making of the world and the man which will come to be after the
completion of all equally bear upon them the divine image.

For this reason, the whole was called one man, for by the power of God neither was anything omitted,
not will it be, but also that which is expected is held round about equally with that which is present in
the operation containing the whole. Therefore the whole nature which pervades from the first men up to
the last men, is a single image of that which is. The difference of gender concerning male and female was
made in advance at the last in his creature, for the following, I think, reason…[2]

These things having been clarified for us, it is necessary that we return to the previous argument—how,
after the making of the image, God contrives the difference according to male and female in the
creature. For I say that the discussion previously directed by us is useful for us in this matter. For he
who leads all things into existence, and he who had formed by his own will man according to the divine
image, did not wait to see the number of souls completed in its own fullness in the gradual additions of
those coming after. Since, however, comprehending all at once, by means of the operation of
foreknowledge, the whole human nature in its fullness and honouring it with the lot which is exalted and
equal to the angels, he foresaw with the power of foresight that the will would not travel straightly
towards the good, and that for this reason it would fall from the life equal to the angels—therefore, so
that the multitude of human souls would not be cut short, having fallen from that way according to
which the angels increased to a multitude, he makes in the nature a contrivance for increase appropriate
to those who have fallen into sin, implanting in the human race the bestial and irrational way of
succession the one from the other.[3]

What we can see from the above is that ‘by the divine foreknowledge and power’, all men
were created in the first making. This is not to be taken as an actual creation by God of all
men’s souls in a single act. It is to be taken as an expression of the divine purpose in making
man, man whom by the power of foreknowledge God had before his Mind in the fullness of
every man who ever would be. St Gregory has avoided the pre-existence of souls by speaking
of the foreknowledge of God: quite properly, he insists that all of God’s works through all the
ages have a definite character in the eternal Mind of God; there is nothing vague or indefinite
in the Divine Mind.
St Gregory also insists on the unity of the human nature: all men from the first to the last
bear, and will bear, the image of God, and when God made man in his image, he had in his
Mind by foreknowledge every specific man who ever would be.

St Gregory then goes on to speak of the second aspect of the creation of man, that which
corresponds to the passage ‘Male and female he made them’. Above, we have provided St
Gregory’s explanation why God made man with a difference of gender.

The question arises, however: is St Gregory of Nyssa teaching two creations of man? We
think not. We think that the proper interpretation of what St Gregory is saying is precisely
how St Maximos the Confessor interprets the matter.[4] We disagree with the interpretation
that St Gregory of Nyssa teaches a double creation. The first creation of all the human race in
the first man is not to be construed as an actual creation, given the repeated emphasis of St
Gregory on the foreknowledge of God. However, when God created Adam, God already had
definite foreknowledge of every man who ever would exist. He had knowledge of the exalted
state of man equal to that of the angels that he himself had given to man, but also
foreknowledge of the sin of man, so that while it was not the will of God that man should
procreate by the distinction of male and female, that distinction was implanted in man
—‘last’, St Gregory says, but before the Fall—so that the human race would not remain
uncompleted because of the sin into which it would fall.

St Gregory later goes on, in Chapter 28, to argue against the pre-existence of souls prior to
conception and against the creation or implantation of the soul after conception. He takes
the firm position in Chapter 29 that each man’s soul comes to exist at his conception—that
soul of which God had definite foreknowledge in the creation of man:

…But man being one, he who was constituted by means of soul and body, it is necessary to consider that
the principle of his constitution [at conception] is one and common, so that he should not become
antecedent and newer than himself, the bodily element coming first in him, the other [i.e. the soul]
being delayed. But it is necessary to say that by the power of the foresight of God (according to the
argument which was given just previously), all the fullness of humanity pre-existed, bearing witness
together with this the prophecy which says: ‘God knows all things before their coming to be.’ In the
creation of each man, however, it is necessary not to add the one to the other, neither the soul before the
body [by the actual pre-existence of the soul prior to conception] nor the reverse [by the existence of the
body prior to the existence of the soul], so that the man, existing, might not rebel against himself being
divided by the difference in time.[5]
The pre-existence of the fullness of humanity is not to be understood as the objective
creation in a single divine act of every man’s soul but as divine foreknowledge of every
specific man who would ever be. However, St Gregory says, having foreknowledge also of the
Fall, God created Adam and Eve male and female. Now he is saying, in the conception of
each man, it is necessary, given that man is a unity composed of soul and body, to believe
that the soul and body of each man come into actual existence at the same moment, that
being the moment of the actual conception of the man in question by the act of bodily
procreation.

St Gregory then continues, in a very important passage, to say that just as the stalk of wheat
arises from the seed in a certain natural order of development, without our saying that any of
the stages of the development of the stalk of wheat pre-exists or happens previously in the
nature of the seed—for we say that the natural power lying in the seed is manifested with a
certain natural order without there being another nature that is infused into the seed—in the
same way, we understand that the human seed has at its conception sown together with it
the power of its nature and that it unfolds and is manifested by a natural sequence as it
progresses towards its perfection, not taking anything up from outside itself as the starting-
point of its perfection, but leading itself towards perfection by means of a sequence. It is
therefore, says St Gregory, not true to say either that the soul is before the body or that the
body is engendered without the soul.

What St Gregory means is that the human seed unfolds with a certain natural order of
unfolding and manifestation of its powers, without, for all that, anyone being able to say that
one part of the human is before the other, or that something enters from without into the
developing human at some later time—St Gregory is referring to a soul, not to nutrition.
Clearly, St Gregory understands the principle of unfolding to be the soul. Moreover, he later
goes on to say, very soundly from a scientific point of view, that the developing human
manifests the different powers of the soul, which exists from conception, in a sequence, first
the vegetative powers of the soul, then the powers of sense-perception, then the powers of
reason—without for all that it being possible to discern the powers of the soul before they
come into operation by means of the body itself at the appropriate stage of development.

Now this is very important from the point of view of Christian anthropology in relation to
modern biology. For it is clear that those functions of the soul that St Gregory understands to
be responsible for the development of the human—the unfolding of the human in the womb
and the development of the limbs, the development of the possibility of sense-perception and
so on—are understood with great insistence by modern biology to be functions of the DNA.
The reader may recall our reference in Chapter I to the contemporary theologian who was
struck by the modernity of St Gregory, since St Gregory had posited in On the Making of
Man that the soul was in no one part of the body and since this was proved to be true by the
presence of DNA in every cell of the body. As we remarked then, it is this control over the
process of development assigned by St Gregory to the soul, which control modern biology
assigns to the information content of the DNA at the moment of conception, that must have
struck the theologian as defining the soul. Moreover, as we have seen, modern biology insists
on the completely material nature of the process of development under the control of the
DNA.

As we have pointed out, however, the soul is not construed by St Gregory of Nyssa to be
material, nor is there anything in the development of the human in the womb, which is not
implicit, according to St Gregory, in what is already contained naturally in the human seed.
Yes, the DNA is there. Yes, the maternal-effect genetic control factors are present in the
cytoplasm of the newly fertilized egg. But so is the soul. And, as we have said, the soul does
not govern the DNA, it enables the fertilized egg of which it is a part, if we can put it that
way, to proceed on the course of development. One thing is the material substrate which
includes the DNA with the particular material information that it provides; another is the
human soul which, just as God governs the universe, governs all in the embryo without being
a chemical in the chemical reactions—rather, potentiating and making possible the unfolding
of the embryo from the fertilized egg.

As St Gregory himself says:

For just as it is not possible to see in that which is placed towards the conception of the body the
articulation of the members, thus neither is it possible to comprehend in the same the properties of the
soul before they come into operation. And just as one would not doubt that that which is implanted is
shaped into the varieties of joints and entrails, there being no other power in addition entering in, but
the power which lies in it naturally towards this operation being transformed, thus also it is equally true
to suppose analogously concerning the soul, that even if it is not recognized by means of some
operations of that which appears, it is nonetheless in it. For also the form of the man who is going to be
constituted is there in potential, but it is hidden on account of the fact that it is not possible for it to
manifest itself prior to the necessary chain of events. Thus the soul also is in that and not apparent; it
 will appear, however, by means of its own proper operations according to nature as it advances together
with the bodily growth.[6]

We ourselves are rather struck by the biological sophistication of St Gregory. We have seen
in a textbook of developmental biology comments rather hostile towards Christianity as
being historically obscurantist in matters of biology.[7] Here we have a Father of the Church
writing in the Fourth Century who has an excellent grasp of the principle of developmental
biology. For the idea that it is by a chain of events, each building on the preceding, that an
organism develops is fundamental to the approach of developmental biology.

Chapter III -- 49

We shall now see how St Gregory handles the problem of the source of the soul. For the soul
must come from somewhere.

What he says in the next passage is that living bodies beget the living; dead bodies do not
beget anything. For that reason, St Gregory says, it is reasonable to consider that that which
is sent forth from the living body to be the occasion of life is itself alive. But that which is sent
forth, although alive, does not contain flesh and bones and hair and as many things as are
seen in man, but these things are present potentially even if they do not yet appear. In the
same way we must consider that that which is sent forth contains the soul, although, just as
with the parts of the body, we do not see the operations of the soul until bodily development
should have progressed appropriately. Instead, St Gregory says, the soul initially manifests
those operations which are appropriate to the initial stage of development, namely:

…in making for itself by means of the implanted matter the suitable dwelling
place. For we do not consider that it is possible to harmonize the soul to alien
buildings, just as it is not possible that the seal in the wax should be fitted to an
alien engraving.[1]

For, St Gregory says, just as the body proceeds from something very small towards the
perfect, thus also the operation of the soul, appropriately implanted in the substrate,
together advances and together increases. First there is only the power of growth and
nutrition (the vegetative power of the soul), then when the man is born there is manifested
the power of sense-perception (the animal power of the soul), then comes the rational power,
not appearing all at once, but manifesting itself together with the increase of the body by
means of study and bearing fruit as much as the power can find place in the substrate.[2]

This account of the transmission of the soul with the living sperm must be considered in the
light of St Gregory’s doctrine that the soul comes into existence at the same time as the body.
It is hard to see just what St Gregory means when he enunciates the doctrine that the soul is
transmitted with the sperm. For his obvious meaning is that the living sperm contains the
whole soul, and that that soul then proceeds to direct the development of the sperm into a
full human being in the womb, manifesting itself as the embryo develops in the womb and
after. But this implies that the sperm even before conception contains the soul, something
which contradicts St Gregory’s notion that the soul comes into existence with the body at
conception.

This account of the transmission of the soul with the human sperm also presupposes that the
human sperm is by itself sufficient for the development of the human being. Here, St
Gregory is wrong on a detail of biology. For we now know that in the ordinary course of
affairs a human is conceived by the fertilization of a human egg in the woman by the human
sperm of the man. Moreover, St Gregory’s view that the soul cannot live in alien buildings
raises the question of human cloning. Given these two matters, we will now discuss St
Gregory’s account from the point of view of modern biology.

As we have already remarked, St Gregory has a very good grasp of developmental biology.
We suspect that it is from a reading of Aristotle, the great biologist, that he obtained such a
good grasp of development. However, modern biology is both anti-Aristotelian—because of
Aristotle’s vitalism and his doctrine of final causes or goals towards which biological
processes tend—and strictly materialistic and mechanistic. So, while the modern biologist
might concede that St Gregory has a good grasp of development, he would reject the notion
that a soul has anything to do with either the development of a man or the resulting adult. A
sperm and egg unite; a man is engendered. The biologist can implant a nucleus from a
somatic cell into an unfertilized egg and produce a man. So it appears. We say ‘so it appears’
for the simple reason that no one has ever admitted to bringing a human clone to term, at
least not with such scientific credentials that he has ever been believed. That humans have
been cloned is true. The law, at time of writing, permits human cloning in the United
Kingdom, and the practice is apparently not forbidden in the United States. It may be
permitted or tolerated in other countries where the scientific practice of biology is
sufficiently advanced for human cloning to be a practical possibility; we do not have details.
However, as far as we know, the present official practice is to use cloned humans for the
production of tissue cultures and not to implant them in surrogate mothers so that they
might be brought to term. Insofar as the embryo is not destroyed by the actual procedure of
producing the tissue cultures, then the embryo as far as we know is later destroyed. The
English law specifies that the human cloned embryo be destroyed no later than
approximately the fourteenth day after ‘conception’.

Perhaps all of this turns what St Gregory is saying into well-written nonsense?

No. However, it is necessary to deal with the issues one by one. First the issue of materialism
in biology. We have already addressed this issue in Chapter I, and we will not repeat
ourselves here. There is a fundamental gulf between the ideology, the world-view, the
paradigm of modern biology, which as we have said is materialistic and mechanistic, and the
worldview of Christian theology. It is not merely a matter of the Christian writers being
writers who lived in the Fourth Century. There is a fundamental problem with the
orientation of the biologist today.

The greatest difficulty today with St Gregory’s position is the notion that the soul has a role
in the development of the body. That is what St Gregory was saying when he said that the
first operation of the soul was to build for itself a suitable dwelling place since it cannot live
in an alien dwelling, just as the seal in the wax cannot be fit to a foreign engraving. According
to the biologist today, it is clear that all the information necessary for the development of the
human from the fertilized egg is contained in the information content of the DNA at
conception. While it is true, the biologist says, that the human develops by an unfolding, that
unfolding is under the direct control of the information found in the DNA at conception.
Hence there is no longer room for the soul in the development of ‘the suitable dwelling
place’, nor even any necessity to posit the existence of a soul: the human can be analysed
with regard to his development perfectly well without the introduction of a concept of soul,
on the basis of the molecular genetics of development.
While there is overwhelming evidence for the definitive role of the DNA in development, we
would like to remark that it is still early.[3] The cloned animals that were said to prove the
feasibility of human cloning suffer illnesses that their prototypes do not. They have
compromised immune function and higher rates of infection, tumour growth, and other
disorders. They have a tendency to be born larger and to put on more weight than is proper
given their prototype. They have a tendency to die young, sometimes for unknown reasons.
Perhaps, given the very low success rate in the actual cloning procedure, given the rather
high rate of miscarriage in the cloned animals that are implanted in surrogate mothers so as
to be brought to term, given the rather high rate of illnesses that have to do with
malfunctioning of DNA-based control systems, it is too early to be confident that we know
everything there is to know about development. Science is replete with cases of
overconfidence based on a ‘breakthrough’ until such a time as all the consequences of the
‘breakthrough’ have been thoroughly studied. That having been said, as a caution as to
whether we know everything there is to know about development, let us return to the
question.

We do not think the St Gregory is wrong. We think that what he is saying is valid even given
the manifest role of DNA and its information content in development. For, as we have said,
the soul is not material; it is not a hidden chemical that enters into the chemical reactions. It
is an intelligible substance that obeys its own laws.

We do not say that the chemical reactions are directed by the soul so that, say Protein A is
produced at this instant instead of Protein B. Most of the time, the protein that is produced is
the protein that is specified by the DNA. However, for the fertilized egg to progress on the
road of development, the soul must be present, just as God must be present.

Let us now turn to the question of the transmission of the soul. This is a very important
question. St Gregory espouses a doctrine of the transmission of the soul through the human
sperm. We will find in Chapter IV, below, that in the High Middle Ages, St Thomas Aquinas
enunciated a doctrine that the soul was created by God sometime after conception, although
the Roman Catholic Church as a whole evidently settled on a doctrine that the soul was
created by God at the moment of conception.
Now the first problem is that St Gregory was evidently unaware of the necessity of the
maternal egg for conception to take place. We do not think that he emphasized the human
sperm as the source of the soul for any reason other than that he had been taught that that
was how humans came to be: the human sperm was sufficient unto itself for the development
of the human; the mother who conceived the child was merely a source of nutriment and
protection for the human sperm. We find the same doctrine in St Thomas Aquinas in the
Thirteenth Century.

The second problem is that the current procedure for cloning of humans uses an unfertilized
human egg, although one taken from a living woman. In the cloning procedure as we
understand it today, that unfertilized human egg is denucleated[4] and the nucleus from a
somatic cell of the prototype of the clone-to-be is implanted in the egg in place of the
removed nucleus.[5] The egg is then electrically or chemically stimulated to provoke the
reaction that corresponds to fertilization in the natural case, and the development of the
human begins to take place—if it does: the success rate is very low.

Our own view is that if the Nyssian doctrine of the transmission of souls is to be retained,
then a modification must be made to it: it must be the female egg, not the male sperm that is
the bearer of the soul. This is not to espouse an ideology but to be able to account for the
procedure of human cloning. The doctrine of the transmission of the soul has advantages: It
accounts for cloning if the modification suggested is made to it. It also accounts, in the
natural case, for the development of identical twins. For natural identical twins develop from
a single fertilized egg. For a certain number of cell divisions, all the cells of the embryo retain
the biological potential to develop into a complete individual. In the case of human identical
twins, during this period of total potential, the embryo for reasons as yet unknown to science
splits into two, and two genetically identical individuals develop. We have discussed the
matter of identical twins and their genetic identity in Chapter I; we need not repeat ourselves
here. However, from the point of view of accounting for the souls in the identical twins—for
each identical twin has a soul; they are not two bodies with one soul—the transmission
doctrine of the soul makes it easy to account for how from one embryo with one soul,
suddenly we have two genetically identical embryos each with its own soul. Moreover,
identical twins can be produced by human intervention from eggs fertilized—or, we imagine,
cloned—in the laboratory. That is, once a human egg is fertilized in vitro it can then be
mechanically separated into two identical twins in the laboratory by the scientist who has
done the in vitro fertilization. Much the same practice of mechanically separating cells at a
very early stage of development is used for the creation of embryonic cell cultures, the ones
that are used for the production of tissue cultures. The transmission doctrine, especially
when the transmission of the soul is tied to the human egg, enables us to account for the soul
in each of the mechanically produced identical twins.

Of course, it will be objected that there is a regular natural wastage of human eggs. Perhaps,
it might be asked, are all these eggs souls which are lost? We think not. The egg provides the
potential of life; it does not provide life itself. The soul is transmitted with the egg. The soul,
as St Gregory of Nyssa has said, comes into existence at conception at the same time as the
body.

However, this answer may not be satisfactory, and the only possible solution would be to
discard the theory of transmission of the soul in favour of the creation by God of the soul at
the moment of conception, even when, in the case of cloning, the ‘conception’ occurs without
the benefit of human sperm, by means of the implantation of the nucleus of a somatic cell of
the to-be-cloned donor into an unfertilized human egg. Then in all cases of cloning and
identical twins whether naturally or artificially produced, we would simply say that God
created a human soul at the instant that the conception, or its analogue, or the separation of
the embryo into two, took place.

The next question we must address is the question of when conception takes place. The usual
notion of conception is that conception takes place when a sperm fertilizes an egg.[6]
However, as we learn from Professor John Breck, this view is challenged by certain Roman
Catholic theologians who argue that human conception occurs on about day 12 after
(natural) fertilization, when the embryo implants itself in the wall of the uterus.[7] Until
then, these theologians argue, the embryo—or pre-embryo as they prefer—is merely a mass
of undifferentiated cells. This seems, evidently, to be much the same logic as is behind the
English law permitting cloning of humans for the production of tissue cultures with the
presupposition that all embryos will be destroyed before approximately day 14.

This argument appears to be a subterfuge so that a loophole might be found in the ‘Law’ for
the practice of abortion, in vitro fertilization and other scientific experiments and practices
which are otherwise forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church, since the Roman Catholic
Church takes the strict view that every human embryo has a soul from conception. The logic
is to change the date of conception so as to open a window for the forbidden practices. We do
not think that the theologians’ arguments are scientifically valid, even when they are arguing
scientifically. These theologians’ arguments betray a misunderstanding of the nature of the
genetic program of development. However a detailed refutation would be very technical, and
we will avoid that here.[8]

Without dwelling on our reasoning because of its technical biological nature, we think that,
given what we know today about fertilization, the most natural moment to consider that
conception has taken place is immediately after the entry of the sperm into the human egg,
when the fertilization reaction takes place that blocks the entry of a second sperm into the
egg. There then immediately commences a series of chemical reactions that are clearly
‘designed’ to initiate the process of development. While it is quite true that it is not until after
the first cell division that the sperm and egg genomes[9] are a united whole,[10] and that it is
not until after the first cell division at the earliest that the human genome begins
transcription,[11] we must return to the insight into developmental biology of a St Gregory of
Nyssa: while we may not see evidence either of the operations of a soul or, somatically, of
flesh, bones and hair in the zygote or embryo, the soul is there; and the soul’s operations and
all aspects of the somatic existence of a human being are present in the embryo in
potentiality; and the development of a human being which has a soul in the image of God has
commenced with the regular unfolding of the stages of development according to a natural
sequence, each stage building on the preceding one.

Let us turn to another position that we have seen, this time in an academic textbook of
human genetics. There, the authors, speaking of the matter of abortion, remark that
although the embryo is potentially a person, it is not yet a person; hence, they imply, it
cannot yet be considered a person who is wronged by being aborted. This, curiously enough,
was much the reasoning of the Canadian Supreme Court decision permitting abortion: the
rights guaranteed to persons under the Canadian Constitution do not apply to the embryo or
fœtus since it is not a person.

In view of the fact that St Gregory of Nyssa himself speaks of the operations of the soul and
of the aspects of the body as being present in the embryo in potentiality—although he himself
asserts, clearly, that both the soul and the body of the human come into existence at the
instant of conception—it is well to consider this question: if an embryo or fœtus has the
attributes or operations of a person in potentiality, is it a person or is it merely tissue that
might, if things go well, later become a person?

The answer is simple: if one accepts that a person has a soul, then that person became a
person when he acquired that soul. If, however, the existence of the soul is denied, as it is in
the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm of modern biology, then one can easily assert
that the personhood of the embryo or fœtus commences with the expression of certain
operations of the nervous system in the womb, or with being born, or with being born in an
acceptable condition. For what is the personhood of a human person? If he is merely a
concourse of biochemical reactions, then his personhood is relative to the quality of his
reactions. If, however, he has the dignity of an image of God, and that dignity is bestowed on
him at the moment of his conception, then our reverence for the Prototype extends to the
image of the Prototype from the moment that that image comes into existence. This is true
even if the image is not immediately expressed in its fullness because of the very specific
nature of human embryonic development in the womb: each stage builds on the preceding
stage, just as among the plants and animals.

[2] The reader will recall that KG III, 76, discussed in Section 6, above, teaches exactly the same doctrine. This seems to
be yet another place where Evagrius shows his Cappadocian roots.

[3] There is a school of biology called ‘Developmental Systems Theory’ which challenges the conventional biological
paradigm on this matter of the relation of the DNA to the other cytological and environmental factors in development,
emphasizing the non-DNA factors in development. See Oyama and Schaffner, including in the latter case the
responses to Schaffner’s paper in the same issue of the journal.

[4] The nucleus is removed, including, of course, all the nuclear DNA.

[5] The formal name for this procedure is Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT).

[6] In the case of St Gregory of Nyssa, he would evidently consider that conception took place when the sperm was
implanted in the woman by the very act of procreation.
[8] The reader is referred to our analysis of the logic of the genetic program in Genetic.

[9] I.e. nuclear DNA.

[11] Gilbert p. 181. Transcription is the reading of the nuclear DNA for the production of proteins

Chapter III -- 50

Let us now turn to a related question, that of the status of the human soul when the body is
damaged. St Gregory of Nyssa speaks to this matter systematically in On the Making of
Man; it is an important part of his anthropology.

In Chapter 10, St Gregory asserts that the mind (nous) operates by means of the senses. We
ourselves will have to expand this concept somewhat, in order to be able to fit the notion of
contemplation into it. For we must accept that in the first instance the mind (nous) works by
means of the senses, but that in order to attain to contemplation the mind (nous) must
surpass the senses. This would not have troubled St Gregory, since he is one of the foremost
theoreticians and practitioners of contemplation in the history of Christianity.

In Chapter 11, St Gregory asserts that the mind (nous) is not to be identified with the senses.
We have already seen this point in Chapter I of the present work.

In Chapter 12, St Gregory addresses the question of where the mind (nous) is to be located.
He rejects its localization in any of the likely places—in the heart, in the head, in the liver. In
discussing these possibilities, he reflects on the fact that it is true that various diseases and
even alcohol disturb the functioning of the mind. He then goes on to say in a crucial passage:

Having been taught that the intellectual operations [of the mind] are blunted or even completely unable
to act in a certain disposition of the body, I do not make this a sufficient proof that the power of the
mind (nous) is confined in a certain place, as if it would be shut out from its familiar wide places by the
inflammations which occur in the parts of the body. For such an opinion is corporeal, that when the
vessel is previously occupied by something which has been placed in it, then something else cannot find
a place in it. For the intelligible nature neither dwells in the empty spaces of the bodies nor is it pushed
out by the increase of the flesh. But, because the whole body has been created like some musical organ,
 just as it often occurs with those who know how to play music but are unable to show their skill when
the uselessness of the organ does not accept their skill—for that which has been destroyed by time or
broken by a downward fall or made useless by some rust and decay remains speechless and inactive,
even if it is blown into by one who is thought to excel in the art of flute-playing—thus also the mind
(nous), pervading throughout all of the organ [of the body] and touching each of the parts appropriately
by means of its intellectual operations, according to its nature, operates its own familiar operation in
those parts which are in a condition according to nature, but remains, however, unable to act and
inoperative in those parts which are enfeebled in accepting its artful movement. For in a certain way, it
is the nature of the mind (nous) to be familiarly disposed towards that which is in a condition according

to nature, but to be alienated from that which has departed from this condition according to nature. [1]

What St Gregory is saying here is this: The mind (nous) is not something sensible, and it
cannot be assigned a location in the body. As we have already seen in Chapter I of this work,
St Gregory and his sister, St Macrina agreed that the mind (nous) was an intelligible
substance, not a part of the body or a functioning of a part of the body. It is important to
understand this, for what St Gregory is saying is that the mind (nous) is not the nervous
system, nor the functioning of the nervous system. It is an intelligible substance, and it does
not belong to the realm of sensible things, neither does it obey the laws of sensible things.
The relation, says St Gregory, of the mind (nous) to the body is that of the flutist to the flute.
This is a Platonic notion. And just as when the flute is damaged, the flutist can make nothing
of it, without for all that having lost his ability to play the flute, so when the body is damaged,
then the mind (nous) cannot exercise its own native operations in the body, without, for all
that, itself being damaged.

This position has enormous implications. For we have seen that the mind (nous) is the image
of God in man. The mind (nous)—taken in a very broad sense not as the faculty of
ratiocination in a man but as his spiritual nature—is what gives each man his dignity as an
image of God. Let the man be decrepit with age, broken-down by bodily frailty and by injury
to the brain, debilitated by disease—by cancer, by Alzheimer’s Syndrome, by the terminal
stages of AIDS. Still he bears on his brow the image of God. Let Adam have fallen. Still he is
the image of God. Still he has a dignity greater than all of creation. And that image of God
rests upon the brow of each man.

Here is the problem. For the worldly man, especially living in a desacralized world such as
the world today, cannot see the image of God. He sees the suffering; he sees the decrepitude,
the weakness, the inability of the mind (nous) to express in the broken-down body the
operations that it once had. He sees the monetary cost to the state, the emotional burden to
the family, the cost in time and trouble to those who care for the decrepit man. And he says,
for what? For the worldly man does not see the image of God in the broken-down man, but
he considers the personhood to be the interpersonal relationships that now are silent in the
silence of the person afflicted, to be the capacity, now lost, of the person to experience pain
and pleasure, the capacity of the person to love and be loved, the capacity of the person to
experience pleasure in his activities, to succeed, to go somewhere, to be someone. He does
not recognize that we are all sons and daughters of God, that each man exists in relationship
to God. ‘For all live in him.’[2] The man dying lives to God; he is preparing to meet his
Maker. The man living lives to God; he too is preparing to meet his Maker, perhaps today,
perhaps much later than tomorrow. The fact that each man bears the image of God upon his
brow means that his whole being exists in context: yes, certainly, in the context of his
personal development as a child; yes, certainly, in the context of his interpersonal relations;
yes, certainly, in his capacity for human love and the treasuring of another’s company and
love. But at the base of all he exists in context with God. For he is an image of God. That is
what makes a man a son of God. And being a son of God, he exists in context to his Father at
every moment of his life from conception: let him sin, the Father waits; let him turn to the
Father, the Father runs to meet him. Indeed, the man necessarily, because he is the image of
God, exists in context with God from his conception to all eternity. ‘For all live in him.’

This is an experience of the divine love in everyday life: we exist always in relation to God.
This sense of the sacred aspect of everyday life has today been lost to the West. And so,
today, when the person is suffering, when he is no longer able to play, to succeed, to get
ahead, the thoughts turn to euthanasia. What is lost is the point that that person always
existed in his life in relation to God and to all eternity will exist in relation to God. This
dimension has been lost today in the West. The first interpersonal relationship is that
between the person and God. That is a relationship which is never lost, however the person,
sometimes, might try to break it. It is an interpersonal relationship that exists from
conception to all eternity.

But since this dimension has been lost today in the West, when the person is decrepit
whether through Alzheimer’s Syndrome or some other nervous disease, or else has been
born with Down’s Syndrome or some other congenital disorder, an instrumental relationship
is struck up with him and one considers how best to dispose of the problem. This is the fruit
of the materialistic and mechanistic paradigm in biology when it is allowed to leave the
laboratory and take a precedent position in ethics. From his conception a person always
exists in relation to God. And when the person consciously understands that primary
dimension of his existence, then his suffering is sacralized. Not in a sentimental way—we
know the terrible suffering of a cancer patient—but in this way: a monk we knew personally,
having been clearly informed by his doctors of the very poor prognosis of the cancer which
had spread to his liver, said to the author of this work: ‘This is a very great blessing of our
God. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ A week later he was buried.

The assertion that the intelligible substance, the mind (nous), the image of God, is not
disturbed by the malfunctioning of the body but merely cannot express its native operations
has a very great significance for the practice of applying the concept of brain death to the
patient who has suffered damage to his higher brain centres with a view to the removal of his
organs. For if St Gregory is right, then the electrical trace of the cerebral cortex or other
higher brain centres is irrelevant to an assessment as to whether the person is alive or dead.
The mind (nous) is not localized in a place; it cannot be captured by sensible measurements.
Hence, for us, there is a serious question about the dignity of the dying or damaged person:
the utilitarian assessment that there is a greater net gain or consequential good to be had
from the removal of the fresh organs so that others might live or live better whereas the
patient suffers nothing fails to recognize that while he is still alive by more traditional
criteria, the patient’s soul is still in his body, and that the practice of removing the organs is
both an insult to the dignity of his person and the hastening of his death.

Chapter III -- 51

13 The Relation Between Mind and Soul

Let us now turn to a question that we have not yet answered directly: what really is the
relationship between the mind (nous) and the soul (psuche)? The reader will recall that we
had left the matter somewhat ambiguous. Moreover, we had found that Evagrius had a
doctrine that the soul (psuche) was a mind (nous) that had been reduced to the rank of
praktike.
The answer can be put this way. For St Gregory of Nyssa, properly speaking the soul
(psuche) is the mind (nous). The other parts of the soul (psuche), the irascible part (thumos)
and the desiring part (epithumia), are improperly speaking the soul (psuche). He says this in
Chapter 15 of On the Making of Man:

Therefore, since the soul has its perfection in the mental (noeron) and rational (logikon), all that which
is not this may possibly have the same name as the soul (psuche), but it is not really the soul, but a
certain enlivening operation which has been honoured together with the name of the soul. For that
reason, he who legislated each individual thing, similarly gave the irrational animals over to the use of
man, as not lying far from the vegetative life, to be instead of vegetables to those who partake of them.
For he says ‘Eat all the meats, as vegetables of the plant.’ [Gen. 9, 3.] For it seems that the operation of
sense-perception [in the animals] has only some small advantage over that which is nourished and
which increases without it [i.e. the plants]. Let this teach those who love the flesh not to bind the
intellect (dianoia) greatly to those things which appear according to the senses, but to occupy
themselves instead with the advantages of the soul, the true soul being seen in these things; sense-

perception, however, having its equal even in the irrational animals. [1]

The perfection of the soul (psuche) that St Gregory is referring to here, in a treatise written
for a somewhat simpler audience than the treatise we looked at in Chapters I and II, is
precisely the mind (nous). It is, according to St Gregory, the mind (nous) that is the soul
(psuche) properly speaking. The irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia)
are honoured with the name of soul, but they are not the soul properly speaking, only
improperly speaking. Moreover this applies to such vegetative and other operations of the
soul as might be found in man: they are a ‘certain enlivening operation which has been
honoured with the name of soul’.

This might seem an unacceptable position to some. But let us recall the attributes of the
mind (nous) which for St Gregory’s sister, St Macrina, constituted the image of God in man:
the contemplative, the contemplative of existent things and the power of discerning the good
from the worse. This is clearly more than a mere power of the intellect to reason
instrumentally or rationally. It might also be remarked that implicit in this portrait of mind
(nous), although unspoken, is the free will of man, his power to choose. For a man who could
not choose would have no use for a power to discern the good from the worse.

In Chapter 17 of On the Making of Man, St Gregory refers to the well-known passage of

Scripture wherein the Lord is asked about the Resurrection by the Sadducees, who bring
forward the figure of the woman who had seven husbands—in the Resurrection, whose wife
will she be? The Lord answers in this way:

The sons of this Age marry and are given in marriage. Those, however, who are
found worthy to attain to that Age and to the Resurrection from the dead neither
marry nor are given in marriage. For they are not even able to die again; for they
are equal to the angels and they are sons of God, being sons of the Resurrection.
[2]

St Gregory remarks in regard to this passage that the Resurrection promises us nothing other
than a return to the condition that Adam and Eve had in Paradise, a return to the first life
that Adam and Eve had in Paradise. As we already remarked in Chapter II, the Fathers
universally interpret that life in Paradise to have been without marital relations between
Adam and Eve, in sharp contrast to the Protestant doctrine found, for example, in Paradise
Lost by John Milton, or even to the doctrine of St Thomas Aquinas.[3] Certainly, St Maximos
the Confessor follows the point of view of St Gregory. Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter V,
when we discuss the anthropology presented in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith
of St John of Damascus, St John himself asserts that in Paradise Adam and Eve were
nourished not by sensible, material foods, but by the contemplation of God. Hence, while the
position of St Gregory that only the mind (nous) is the soul properly speaking and that only it
bears the image of God might ring hard and harsh in the ears of an Orthodox whose
anthropology either formally or informally has been influenced by Protestant or even
Thomist theology, it is in fact the position of the Fathers of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, it
is even the position of St Paul: ‘For it is well that a man not touch a woman.’ [4] Certainly it
belongs to the common patrimony of Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, whatever
distortions might have crept in, in the West, as a result of the personal influence of St
Augustine as interpreted by St Thomas.

But in Evagrius what exactly is the connection between mind (nous) and soul (psuche)? In
KG III, 28, Evagrius says this:

III, 28 The soul (psuche) is the mind (nous) which because of negligence has fallen from the Unity and
which by consequence of its non-vigilance has descended to the rank of praktike.
A mind (nous) with a certain degree of negligence in the Movement is in the First Judgement
of the Christ given a soul (psuche), and after further negligence is subsequently made in
another judgment of the Christ to incarnate into a human body as a man. As we have already
seen, this is an element of Evagrius’ anthropology that derives not from the Cappadocian
Fathers but from Origen. It is heterodox. Now whether in Evagrius the soul (psuche) is to be
construed to be a kind of clothing of the mind (nous), in the same sense that an angelic mind
(nous) has an angelic body, or whether the mind (nous) has been transformed, in Evagrius’
view, into a soul (psuche) is not clearly discernible in the Kephalaia Gnostica, although we
have tended to the first interpretation of his thought, tending to the view that in the
eschatological context the soul (psuche) is the last clothing of the mind (nous).

Here, however, we encounter the one passage of the Letter to Melania that seems to us to
clarify the Kephalaia Gnostica: this is the passage which deals at length with the relations
among the human body, soul (psuche) and mind (nous).[5] In this passage, it is clear that
the human soul (psuche) stands in the same relation to the human mind (nous) that the
material human body stands to the human soul (psuche).[6] The human soul (psuche) is an
inferior sort of angelic body given to the minds (noes) which have been reduced to the rank
of praktike.

In the Kephalaia Gnostica, Evagrius leaves ambiguous the condition of the mind (nous) in
the soul state, or more clearly put, the state of the unembodied soul (psuche) before that soul
(psuche) has become either a man or a demon. The soul state is a world or worlds in which
the mind (nous) might progress or backslide, so that ascent to the rank of angel or further
incarnation into a human or demonic body would be its reward or punishment, but Evagrius
does not discuss this at all.

Does he posit the existence of the soul state to account for the serial nature of men’s being
born in the flesh? In Peri Archon, this does not seem to be an issue: Origen’s reasoning
seems to have been based on other considerations.

Do souls in the soul state have the temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia)? To the
extent that one is basing himself on Origen, the source of the doctrine of the soul state, they
do not, because Origen, as we have seen, rejects the tripartite soul. However, we have seen
that Evagrius took with him to Egypt the Cappadocian doctrine of the tripartite soul.
Since, in the Evagrian system, praktike corresponds absolutely to the state of having or being
a soul (psuche), and praktike is the ascetical practice of bringing the irascible part (thumos)
and the desiring part (epithumia) from their operations contrary to nature to their
operations according to nature, it might be thought that the unembodied soul (psuche)
would be composed of mind (nous), temper (thumos) and desire (epithumia). But that is not
the case. Evagrius’ doctrine is that these parts of the soul are characteristic not of the
unembodied soul (psuche) but of the soul (psuche) incarnated into a human body, as we see
in KG VI, 85:

VI, 85 If all the powers which we and the beasts have in common pertain to the corporeal nature, then
it is evident that the irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia) do not appear to have
been created with the reasonable nature before the Movement.

Note that ‘all the powers which we and the beasts have in common pertain to the corporeal
nature’—that is, to the life of the soul (psuche) in the body—and that they include the
irascible part (thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia).

One part, then, of Evagrius’ doctrine of the soul (psuche) is based on Origen and one part on
the Cappadocian Fathers. That is, Evagrius discourses sometimes on the basis of the
Cappadocian doctrine of the tripartite soul (psuche) and sometimes on the basis of the
Origenist doctrine of the soul. We think that Evagrius is attempting to combine two
incompatible anthropologies here, and that this leads to confusion in his thought.

In Chapter 35 of the Treatise on the Practical Life,[7] Evagrius states: ‘The passions of the
soul have their occasions or starting-points from men; the passions of the body, from the
body. And continence cuts off the passions of the body, while spiritual charity cuts off the
passions of the soul.’ Since the Treatise on the Practical Life explicitly discusses the
tripartite soul, we have understood Evagrius’ thought to be that passions such as vainglory
and pride are passions of the irascible part of the soul (thumos) and that passions such as
gluttony and fornication are passions of the desiring part of the soul (epithumia).

However, in Chapter 18 of On the Thoughts, Evagrius introduces a different typology: he

implicitly includes vainglory, pride, envy and condemnation with the passions ‘of man as
man’, and gluttony, fornication (both related to the desire, epithumia) and anger (related to
the temper, thumos) with the passions of ‘man as irrational animal’.[8]

How are these two typologies to be reconciled?

We are not happy with the solution proposed by Professor Guillaumont in his doctrinal
introduction to On the Thoughts, that the passions of man as man relate to the mind (nous)
and that the passions of man as irrational animal relate to the irascible part (thumos) and
the desiring part (epithumia).[9] For the passions of the mind (nous) are clearly stated by
Evagrius to be related to ignorance and delusion, whereas vainglory, pride, envy and
condemnation are moral passions. We think that there is an inconsistency in Evagrius’ own
thought: in the works in question he is presenting points of view that depend both on the
Cappadocians’ and on Origen’s anthropologies. For the doctrine of the tripartite soul that
Evagrius espouses in the Treatise on the Practical Life reflects the point of view represented
by KG VI, 85, quoted above, which itself seems to be what Evagrius learned at the feet of his
Cappadocian masters—not, certainly, the part about the Movement, that is his own, but the
part that the powers we have in common with the beasts pertain to the irascible part
(thumos) and the desiring part (epithumia), and that they must therefore be connected with
the corporeal nature. For in Chapter II we found the same doctrine to be espoused by St
Macrina in On the Soul and the Resurrection. The doctrine in Chapter 18 of On the Thoughts
seems to us to be Evagrius’ own reflection on the nature of vainglory, pride, envy and
condemnation in the context of Origen’s anthropological doctrine of the descent of the mind
(nous) first to become ensouled in a soul (psuche) and then through further negligence to
become embodied in a human body. When Evagrius came to write the works in question, he
was beginning, we think, to formulate his idea of the soul state, based on Origen, and he was
beginning to view the passions of man as man as passions that could be assigned to the soul
(psuche) in the soul state. In this interpretation, vainglory, pride, envy and condemnation
are passions of the ensouled mind (nous), taken as a distinct state or condition of the mind
(nous) apart from the embodiment of that ensouled mind (nous) in a human body. The
passions of man as irrational animal would then be those additional passions that the soul
(psuche) acquired when it was embodied in a human body, taking up the irrational animal
nature, including, it would appear, the temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia). But this
basically Origenist typology of the passions would not easily be integrated into the typology
of the passions based on the tripartite nature of the human soul that Evagrius had learned
from the Cappadocians. This would lead to the inconsistencies that we perceive in Evagrius’
two accounts.

However, it should be remarked that in the Skemmata, Evagrius includes both typologies in
the same relatively short work. Evidently, he did not perceive any inconsistency in his
accounts.

We ourselves think that in the Kephalaia Gnostica, an underlying layer of Orthodox

anthropology can be discerned, a layer which Evagrius took with him from Constantinople to
Egypt and upon which he superimposed his own elaborated system based on Origen,
without, however, fully resolving the inconsistencies between the two.

In the case of the distinction found in the Treatise on the Practical Life between the passions
of the soul and the passions of the body, this may very well be the Origenist distinction of the
passions of man as man and the passions of man as irrational animal repeated with
somewhat different terminology and superimposed on the Cappadocian tripartite soul.
Hence, there may be no real way to assign the passions of the soul to a part of the tripartite
soul: it may be forcing Evagrius to consider the passions of the soul to be passions of the
temper (thumos). However, given that there is no solution to this conundrum, we will do just
that. Moreover, there are passages of Evagrius, such as Chapter 31 of the Gnostic, which do
that very same thing.

We have now finished with Orthodox anthropology. In the next chapter, we will look at
Roman Catholic anthropology for purposes of contrast with the Orthodox doctrine. This will
have several uses. On the one hand, it will clarify by contrast just what Orthodox
anthropology is; on the other hand, it will clarify the differences in presupposition between
Roman Catholic ethical and bioethical doctrines and Orthodox ethical and bioethical
doctrines. Unfortunately, we are not experts in Roman Catholic, and especially Thomist,
theology, and so our presentation will to an extent necessarily be from secondary sources.

In the next chapter we will also look at Roman Catholic psychology. Our discussion will help
to clarify for us—and especially for such readers as we might ever have who are Roman
Catholic—what the differences are between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic
presuppositions of ascetical and spiritual practice and doctrines, especially with regard to the
practice of mental prayer in the heart. As is well known, for many years in the Twentieth
Century, Roman Catholic scholars studying Hesychasm were either bemused or scandalized
by this Orthodox spiritual tradition. While it goes to be said that their attitude has become
somewhat more open, still that great opponent of Hesychasm in the Fourteenth Century,
Barlaam, was a committed Scholastic and, even today, the notion of the ‘uncreated
operations (aktistes energeies) of God’ makes, exactly on the basis of Thomist categories,
Roman Catholics who have studied Orthodox Hesychast theology uneasy: these
considerations make it uncertain whether a Roman Catholic who practised the Prayer of
Jesus, or who would attempt to practise it, especially in its higher forms, would be able to do
so consistently with his own theological presuppositions. We do not intend to reopen
wounds. We are not experts in Thomism. However, we shall try to discern where Thomist
psychology would from an Orthodox point of view lead to a mistaken use or practice of
mental prayer in the heart. This will force us to clarify our own understanding of Orthodox
ascetical psychology, which is what we want to do.

In the final chapter, we will discuss the vocation of man, turning briefly also to the
anthropology presented in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of St John of
Damascus.

[6] We ignore here, for reasons we have already discussed, the doctrine of the passage concerning the relations of the
human mind (nous) with the various persons of the Trinity.

Chapter IV -- 1

IV WESTERN CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGIES

In what does the particular or peculiar character of Thomism consist?

It is often said that Orthodoxy is Platonist and that Catholicism—that is, Thomism—is
Aristotelian. But we have already seen in Chapter II that St Gregory of Nyssa presents his
sister St Macrina as adapting Aristotle’s psychology to the Genesis account of creation in
order to explain the origin and nature of the passions.

St John of Damascus, that criterion of Orthodoxy to whom we shall refer in Chapter V, is

Aristotelian in orientation. He is often quoted by St Thomas Aquinas. We discover, however,
in an article in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘John of Damascus’ by L. Sweeney SJ, that St
John is a ‘Christian Neoplatonist’:[1] perhaps labels like this are wrong.

St Maximos the Confessor is an Aristotelian in his philosophy, and St Maximos is a Father of

the Orthodox Church.

Moreover, we will see that St Thomas Aquinas draws on the Augustinian tradition for his
own anthropology. But St Augustine is clearly stated in the West to be a Neoplatonist,
something surely borne out by even a cursory reading of Plotinus’ Enneads.[2] In fact, it
seems to us that modern commentators often seem to misunderstand St Augustine because
of a lack of familiarity with the Neoplatonism of Plotinus.

Perhaps the peculiar character of Thomism consists in the fact, then, that St Thomas
Aquinas has five philosophical proofs for the existence of God?

But St Maximos the Confessor, seven hundred years before St Thomas, provides in the
Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion) 10, 36,[3] St Thomas Aquinas’ preferred proof for the
existence of God, that from motion. Of course, the proof is taken by each of these authors
from Aristotle’s Physics.

Perhaps the peculiar character of Thomism, of Catholicism, consists, then, in the fact that
Catholicism places a very great emphasis in moral theology on the concept of ‘natural law’?

But the concept of natural law has its roots in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans (Rom. 2, 14–
16), and St John Chrysostom, that beacon of Orthodox interpretation, in his commentaries
on the passage even exalts the natural law revealed to the Gentiles above the Mosaic Law. Of
course, St John was a rhetorician. St Maximos the Confessor himself identifies the natural
law with (second) natural contemplation, and states that it is equal in honour to the written
Law of Scripture.[4]

Perhaps the peculiar character of Thomism, of Catholicism, consists, then, in the fact that St
Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastic theologians were preoccupied with questions of
philosophy? There is more truth to this. However, St Maximos the Confessor, has in the
Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion) 10, 38[5] a discussion of time and place—quite astutely
from the point of view of the general theory of relativity he asserts that being in a place
necessarily implies being in time and vice versa—that demonstrates that he was a trained
philosopher.

Moreover, St John of Damascus devotes one volume of the trilogy called the Fountain of
Knowledge, the third volume of which is the famous Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,
to an exposition of Aristotelian philosophy.

Perhaps the peculiar character of Thomism, of Catholicism, is that Orthodoxy is mystical

whereas Catholicism is not? There is more truth to this. However, at least formally, St
Thomas Aquinas adopts many of the positions of St Dionysios the Areopagite in his own
systematic theology. And it would be difficult to say that there have been no mystics in the
Roman Catholic Church since the time of St Thomas Aquinas.

In what, then, does the peculiar character of Thomism consist?

In our view, there are several salient characteristics of Thomism which have both given
Thomism its peculiar character and shaped subsequent Catholic thought. But before we list
them let us look at another question: is St Thomas Aquinas the norm of Catholic theology
today?

When we were preparing this book, we asked a friend of ours to send us a modern handbook
of Catholic theology, leaving it to him, who was married to a Catholic woman, to find the
appropriate book. He sent us a book by the former Chairman of the Department of Theology
at Notre Dame University of South Bend, Indiana, USA. This is one of the foremost Catholic
universities in the United States of America. The book is said on the cover to have sold over
150,000 copies. It is a popular exposition for Catholic laymen and laywomen—and perhaps
even for Catholic priests and theologians—of theological developments in the Roman
Catholic Church since Vatican II. The book is useful in two ways: it has convenient brief
summaries of major trends in theology, so that you can understand who some of the main
theologians are and what their main positions are, not only in the Roman Catholic Church
but even in the Protestant churches and even in the Orthodox Church (as the author
understands it); and it gives you a feel for the temper of Roman Catholic theology in America
today: the edition we have was published in 1994. The book can hardly be considered
Thomist in orientation. The book is Catholicism by Fr R. P. McBrien.[6]

Fr McBrien, however, writes this about Thomism:

No theologian in the entire history of the Church has had such a decisive impact on Catholic thought
and the shaping of the Catholic tradition as St Thomas Aquinas. His Summa Theologiae is the most
comprehensive synthesis (that is what the word summa means) of the biblical, Patristic, and medieval
understandings of the Christian faith, and has significantly shaped the interpretation and articulation of
the faith ever since.[7]

We learn from the book the interesting fact that Pope John Paul II, the previous Pope, was a
product of the Lublin School of Thomism.[8] This school of Thomism is characterized,
according to Fr McBrien, by the retention of St Thomas Aquinas’ realist principles in
philosophy as interpreted by J. Maritain and É. Gilson, two modern interpreters of St
Thomas, and by the incorporation into that framework of the insights of such existentialists
as G. Marcel, M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers and M. Buber, along with the phenomenology of M.
Scheler and R. Imgarden. Notable is that Marcel’s philosophy is personalist in orientation, in
a manner similar to that of Buber, but of independent origin and articulation.[9]

In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, we find the following in the article ‘St Thomas Aquinas’
by V. J. Bourke, compiler of and, in part, translator for, The Pocket Aquinas,[10] to which
we shall have occasion to refer:

…Aquinas has been given a special position of respect in the field of Catholic scholarship, but this does
not mean that all Catholic thinkers agree with him on all points. Within three years of his death [in
1274] a number of propositions closely resembling his philosophic views were condemned as errors by
Bishop Tempier of Paris. This episcopal condemnation was formally revoked in 1325. Thomistic thought
 met much criticism in the later Middle Ages. Since the Renaissance, nearly all popes have praised
Aquinas’ teaching; the one who provided for the first collected edition of his works (St. Pius V) also did
the same for St. Bonaventure, a Franciscan, and proclaimed both Doctors of the Church. In the
ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church, revised in 1918, canon 589:1 states that students for the
priesthood are required to study at least two years of philosophy and four of theology, “following the
principles of St Thomas.” Further, canon 1366:2 directs professors in seminaries to organize their
teaching “according to the method, teaching and principles of the Angelic Doctor.”

Actually, Thomism has never been the only kind of philosophy cultivated by Catholics, and from the
fourteenth century to the Enlightenment, Thomism was rivaled and sometimes obscured by Scotism [11]
and Ockhamism.[12]

In 1879, with the publication of the Encyclical Aeterni Patris by Pope Leo XIII, the modern revival of
Thomism started. While this document praised Thomism throughout, Pope Leo added this noteworthy
qualification: “If there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word,
improbable in whatever way—it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to our age.” …

In 1914, a group of Catholic teachers drew up a set of 24 propositions which, they felt, embodied the
essential points in the philosophy of Aquinas. The Sacred Congregation of Studies, with the approval of
Pope Pius X, published these “Twenty-four Theses” as clear expressions of the thought of the holy
Doctor. …

These 24 theses represent a rigid and conservative type of Thomism. Many modern Catholic
philosophers, while recognizing that these propositions do express some of the basic themes in the
speculative thought of Aquinas, doubt that it is possible to put the wisdom of any great philosopher into
a few propositions and prefer to emphasize the open-minded spirit with which Aquinas searched for
information among his predecessors and approached the problems of his own day. After all, it was
Aquinas who remarked that arguments from authority are appropriate in sacred teaching but are the
weakest sort of evidence in philosophic reasoning.[13]

What is clear, however, from the book, Catholicism, and from simple observation, is that
today, in the generation following the end of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), there
is a plethora of trends in Catholic theology. Today, in the United States of America or in
Europe, it would be a mistake to equate Catholicism with Thomism. That may have been true
for the period of the Twentieth Century leading up to Vatican II, but it is now no longer true.
But it is also equally true that the Vatican is more conservative than large parts of Europe
and the United States. Roman Catholicism no longer, ostensibly, speaks with the single voice
that it once did. Nonetheless, Thomism still characterizes official pronouncements on
bioethics that are issued by the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, clearly a philosophy of
such historical importance cannot disappear overnight from the thought patterns of Catholic
thinkers.

As regards issues in anthropology that are important for the study of Orthodox mysticism,
the matter is somewhat more ambiguous: by and large the author of Catholicism himself
manifests a modern post-Enlightenment philosophical orientation. It seems to us that the
anthropology underlying many of his remarks is far removed from Orthodox anthropology.

Given the above considerations, in presenting our remarks on the anthropology and
psychology of St Thomas Aquinas we are running the risk of describing a defunct theological
interpretation of man, at least from the point of view of many Roman Catholic theologians
today in Europe and America. However, we believe that Thomism will continue to be
influential in the Vatican and in the seminaries of the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, a
presentation of St Thomas’ anthropology and psychology will help us to clarify certain points
in our own Orthodox interpretation of man, both from the point of view of bioethics and
from the point of view of the psychology of mental prayer in the heart. Let us now turn back
to the question we raised.

[8] Lublin is a city in Poland.

[11] The system of St John Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308), based on the tradition represented by St Augustine (354–430)
and St Bonaventure (c.1217–74). (Our note.)

[12] The nominalist school represented by William of Ockham (c.1285–1349). (Our note.)

[13] Encyclopedia Volume 8, p. 113–14. It should be remarked that this article was published in 1967, very soon after
the end of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), and that it is therefore somewhat dated. For example, the Roman
Catholic code of canon law has since been revised, although we ourselves do not know the present status of Thomism
under it for priestly studies. The passages given, however, do allow the reader to grasp the historical importance of the
philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the Roman Catholic tradition.

Chapter IV - 2

It seems to us that the salient features of Thomism that give it its particular character are
these: First, and most important, is the identification of God with pure being or pure
existence (Latin: esse; = Greek: einai). É. Gilson, on whose presentation of Thomism we
have to a certain extent relied, remarks that this is St Thomas Aquinas’ great insight and
stroke of genius. Be that as it may, it is not an Orthodox approach to the Holy Trinity. For
example, St Maximos the Confessor asserts, following St Dionysios the Areopagite, that God
is not being, but the source of being. As he says in the Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion)
10, 38:

Whence, saying that the Divine exists, we do not say how it exists. And for this
reason we say in its regard the ‘is’ and ‘was’ simply and indefinitely and in an
unrestricted manner. For the Divine is unreceptive of every definition and
concept, on account of which not even predicating existence of it do we say that
it exists. For out of it [is] existence, but it is not that very existence. For it is
beyond even existence itself, in either a qualified manner or simply, both spoken
of and thought. If [we consider existence] in a qualified manner, and not simply,
[then] beings have existence, just as [they are subsumed] under the where they
are on account of their position and on account of the limit of their reasons
(logoi) according to nature, and just as they will be completely receptive of being
subsumed under the when they are, on account of the beginning.[1]

This might seem to be a very Scholastic place for us to start discussion of the anthropology of
St Thomas Aquinas. However, it does seem to us that the point of divergence of St Thomas
Aquinas from the Orthodox Fathers is here, and that much of the particular or peculiar
character of Thomism arises from this basic move of St Thomas.

For what St Thomas does is focus in his philosophy on being.[2]

St Thomas makes a second move of the greatest importance both to the character of his
philosophy and to his anthropology: he asserts very strongly that man naturally can know
beings only by sense-perception: from that sense-perception, man abstracts by an act of the
intellect the concept which defines the essence of that being. This of course is St Thomas’
realism. God is pure being; there is a hierarchy of participations in the being of God among
God’s creatures, the created beings. Man can only know beings on the basis of sense-
perception and on the basis of the abstraction of concepts from that sense-perception; and
by the use of reason working propositionally with those concepts, man comes to know the
essences of beings, and, indeed, all the truth that he is naturally capable of apprehending in
this life.

The next characteristic of St Thomas’ philosophy is its rationalism. We have already

remarked in Chapter I on the intense preparation in logic of the high mediæval Scholastic,
comparable to the preparation in mathematics of a physicist at a leading university in the
United States today. St Thomas assimilated this training in logic; he is an expert in the
philosophical analysis of concepts. This mediæval technique is often disparaged nowadays
even among professional philosophers. We do not mean to disparage it.

One simply cannot understand post-mediæval or modern philosophy properly without

understanding mediæval philosophy. Modern philosophy is largely a reaction against
mediæval philosophy, but, that being so, it can only be understood properly by reference to
mediæval philosophy: the positions of modern philosophy are intelligible only when
considered as reactions against mediæval philosophy, culture and faith.

It seems to us that St Thomas, influenced by his studies in logic and by the intellectual
culture of the High Middle Ages, adopted a very rationalistic outlook, especially in his
psychology of man. This outlook might not only be called rationalistic but intellectualistic.

Join this rationalism to the very systematic nature of St Thomas’ thinking, and you begin to
delineate a portrait of Thomism, one that manifests its particular physiognomy: God is pure
being; all beings participate in the being of God in a hierarchy of participations; knowledge is
available to man only on the basis of the sense-perception of sensible beings and on the basis
of the abstraction of universals from that sense-perception; this abstraction is treated in a
rationalistic and intellectualistic way; the philosophy and theology are developed in a very
rationalistic and systematic fashion.

Add to this the particular or peculiar character of Latin as opposed to Greek: Latin is a
simpler language than Greek, and the concepts expressed in it are simpler. Moreover, St
Thomas’ Latin is very simple: unusually for a philosopher, he does not present difficulties in
his language, but in his metaphysics, derived from Aristotle. The reason for this simplicity is
surely St Thomas’ training in logic.

This is the Thomist system. Many of St Thomas’ theological positions are acceptable to the
Orthodox: no one would deny in the Orthodox Church that angels exist, and probably there
is not much wrong with St Thomas’ theology of angels, unless you might want to quibble that
it is not true that each angel is its own species. It is not so much in the formal content of St
Thomas philosophy and theology that its particular or peculiar character arises but in the
aspects of it we have just outlined: the identification of God with pure being; the denial of the
possibility of knowledge apart from sense-perception followed by abstraction from sense-
perception; the great rationalism; the very systematic nature of the philosophy and theology;
the very simple, straightforward language and presentation.

Of course this is not to deny that St Thomas has positions that are unacceptable to the
Orthodox Church.

Nor is it to deny, emphatically not, that much of the content of St Thomas, especially in areas
where he appears to be following St Dionysios the Areopagite and especially in his
anthropology where he is following the earlier Neoplatonizing philosophy of St Augustine,
has undergone a reinterpretation on the basis of the characteristics we have just mentioned
and on the basis of St Thomas’ Aristotelianism, so as to produce a system that is both
formidable and logically coherent—and quite alien to the spirit of the Fathers of the
Orthodox Church.

That is another characteristic that gives St Thomas’ system its particular or peculiar
character: the reinterpretation by St Thomas of his sources, including his Greek and Latin
Patristic sources, so that while he ostensibly retains their content, he redefines that content
on the basis of his systematic, rationalistic Aristotelianism in such a way as to give a quite
different character to that content from the character that it has in its sources.

The final characteristic of Thomism is its very great intellectual depth.

[2] It should be noted that we translate esse (Latin) or einai (Greek) sometimes by being and sometimes by existence,
according to the context. Thomist scholars sometimes translate esse by act of being; this distinguishes it from ens, being
as referring to a concrete existent object. Being and existence are to be identified. They are of course to be contrasted
with essence substantia or essentia; = Greek: ousia). Essence is to be understood in the context of Scholastic philosophy
as that which confers knowability or intelligibility on an object. It is comparable to the reason (logos) of an object of
sense of the Greek Fathers. In Classical Greek philosophy, the definition of a thing was precisely that which conveyed a
complete account of the thing’s essence. (Latin: substantia or essentia; = Greek: ousia). Essence is to be understood in
the context of Scholastic philosophy as that which confers knowability or intelligibility on an object. It is comparable to
the reason (logos) of an object of sense of the Greek Fathers. In Classical Greek philosophy, the definition of a thing was
precisely that which conveyed a complete account of the thing’s essence

Chapter IV -- 3

Let us now turn to St Thomas’ anthropology.

St Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology has, seemingly, all the basic features of the anthropology
that we have already seen in St Gregory of Nyssa and St Macrina, and even, to an extent, in
Evagrius Pontikos.

For in St Thomas Aquinas, man is composed of body and soul; the soul is an intelligible
substance; the soul is composed of intellect and appetite; the appetite is subdivided into the
concupiscence and the irascible part; it is the intellect which gives man his particular
character; body and soul are naturally made to exist together, but the soul can exist outside
the body; the soul is immortal and will be rejoined with the body at the General
Resurrection. These are all positions, evidently taken from traditional Roman Catholic
theology having its origin in the works of St Augustine, that are recognizably the same as the
positions we have already seen in Chapters I, II and III to be those of St Gregory of Nyssa
and of his sister, St Macrina: the intellect of St Thomas Aquinas is to be identified with the
mind (nous); the appetite with the passionate part of the soul; the concupiscence with the
desire (epithumia); and the irascible part with the temper (thumos). But, as we shall see, the
concepts have undergone a transformation in St Thomas’ hands, so that his system is no
longer speaking exactly the same language.

That St Thomas Aquinas, drawing on St Augustine, would have these positions is a very
strong historical argument that these positions of St Gregory of Nyssa and of his sister, St
Macrina, were in fact the positions of the whole Church in their age, and not the Origenist
deviations of St Gregory of Nyssa himself. For it would be foolish to accuse St Augustine or St
Thomas Aquinas of Origenism, and recognizably they have the same anthropology as St
Gregory of Nyssa. Certainly there is an influence, not slavish, of Platonism or Neoplatonism
in St Gregory of Nyssa, St Macrina and St Augustine. But although these authors took
concepts they found useful from the Greek philosophers, they did so as Christians, and,
moreover, the Church endorsed their positions.[1] While the Fathers of the Church did not
follow the anthropology of the Hebrew Old Testament, as some authors today understand
that anthropology, the Church endorsed the point of view of the Fathers. And it is the Church
that is normative for the interpretation of Scripture, not a modern presumed interpretation
of Scripture that is normative for the belief of the Church.

We will now present St Thomas Aquinas’ anthropology and psychology, bearing in mind that
we are interested in issues both of bioethics and of ascetical psychology. We will follow the
presentation of the Summa Theologiae.[2] St Thomas’ presentation, as one would expect, is
clear and systematic: in mediæval Scholastic theology, anthropology and psychology were
basic presuppositions of moral theology, and every mediæval theologian was obliged to
address those fields in expounding his system. Moreover, St Augustine’s own preoccupation
with anthropology and psychology left a legacy of concern over these issues to Western
theology. The only problem arises from St Thomas’ metaphysics: he is very rigorously
grounded in Aristotelian categories of thought. We cannot hope to present an introduction to
Thomist or Aristotelian philosophy: such an undertaking is too difficult and beyond our
knowledge; it is also beyond both the scope of this work and what can be expected of our
beloved Orthodox reader.[3]

We will avoid as much as possible—for it is not completely possible—discussion of the

metaphysical dimensions of St Thomas’ anthropology and psychology: our interest is in
presenting St Thomas’ anthropology and psychology by contrast and comparison with the
anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa and St Macrina that we studied in Chapters I and III,
with his psychology we studied in Chapter II, and even with the anthropology and
psychology of Evagrius Pontikos that we studied in Chapter III. We will find some striking
similarities—more than we ourselves expected—and some important differences. As we
proceed, we will indicate the important similarities with and differences from the
anthropology and psychology of St Gregory of Nyssa and St Macrina that we have already
studied, and also the implications of some of St Thomas’ positions for both bioethics and
ascetical psychology. Since we will discuss the anthropology of St John of Damascus in
Chapter V, we will not discuss it here in relation to St Thomas’ system except in passing. St
John is also an Aristotelian, but one from whom St Thomas differs on significant points in
anthropology, even though he quotes St John as an authority in matters on which he is in
agreement. However, it will be easier for the reader to follow the presentation of St Thomas’
system if we leave St John of Damascus out of the matter as much as possible.

[1] Here we are referring only to the anthropology under consideration.

[3] The interested reader is directed to several standard introductions to Thomist thought: A History of Philosophy,
(Copleston Volume II), and Aquinas (Copleston A), both by Fr F. C. Copleston SJ; and Le Thomisme by Étienne
Gilson (Gilson F), translated into English as The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Gilson E), although from an
earlier edition. Fr Copleston is certainly both a Thomist and an expert in the history of philosophy. In A History of
Philosophy, he is speaking to the Roman Catholic seminarian or university student who requires a good grounding in
Thomism, and he takes the time to explain difficult concepts. The work also has the singular advantage of placing St
Thomas in his historical philosophical context. It might be remarked that it is at first hard to grasp the principles of St
Thomas’ metaphysics (his basic categories of thought) and that Aquinas and Le Thomisme are somewhat more obscure
than St Thomas himself. Fr Copleston’s discussion in Aquinas, pitched to the layman in philosophy who is not
necessarily a Roman Catholic, addresses important issues of Thomism from a contemporary point of view, although
somewhat apologetically. And, of course, Gilson is an authority on mediæval philosophy. However, being largely a digest
of quotations and paraphrases of St Thomas, Le Thomisme is rather more advanced than Fr Copleston’s two works

Chapter IV -- 4

St Thomas begins his presentation of his anthropology in Question 75 of the first part of the
Summa.[1] For St Thomas, man is composed of a spiritual substance, the soul, and a
corporeal substance, the body. The soul is not a corporeal body.[2] In explaining this, St
Thomas states that the soul is the first principle of that which is alive in us, following
Aristotle’s definition of the soul.[3] He then discusses historically, ancient philosophical
theories that this principle of life was corporeal. We have already encountered this ancient
doctrine in Chapter I in our discussion of St Gregory of Nyssa’s and St Macrina’s
anthropology. Moreover, we have already seen that the dominant paradigm in modern
biology, which is materialistic and mechanistic, maintains the point of view that there is no
soul which grants life to the body.

St Thomas then asserts that the human soul is both incorporeal and subsistent.[4] As St
Thomas himself puts it:

Therefore, this intellectual principle called mind [Latin: mens; = Greek: nous] or intellect [Latin:
intellectus; = Greek: dianoia] has an operation by itself which it does not share with the body. Now,
nothing can operate by itself unless it subsists by itself. For, to operate is only characteristic of being in
act, and, consequently, a thing operates in the same manner that it exists. For this reason, we do not say
that heat heats but that a hot thing does. The conclusion remains, then, that the human soul which we

call intellect or mind is something incorporeal and subsistent. [5]

This means that the soul is intelligible, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that its
existence does not depend on any other created object: it exists in and of itself. The
significance of this can be taken from the fact that this is, in St Thomas’ philosophy, a
necessary precondition for the soul to survive death.

St Thomas remarks that, to speak rigorously, it is the man composed of body and soul who
understands by means of the soul, even though we say, loosely, that the soul understands.[6]

St Thomas then denies that the souls of irrational animals are subsistent.[7] That is, the soul
of an irrational animal cannot survive the dissolution of the matter of the animal’s body.

So far, St Thomas has said nothing different from what St Macrina has said, except, perhaps,
for the notion that the man composed of body and soul understands, not the soul alone.

As we noted above, St Thomas considers the human soul to be subsistent. This means, for St
Thomas, that when a man dies, his soul continues to exist. As we have seen, this is connected
in St Thomas’ thought not only to the data of Christian revelation, which he is surely
following on the matter, but also to the doctrine that the intellectual part of the human soul
functions without the use of the body even when the man is alive: the intellectual functions
of the human soul are utterly free of the body, although, as we shall see, the intellect makes
use of ‘sense data’ from the lower, animal part of the soul, which functions in and through
the body. If the intellectual part of the soul, in St Thomas reasoning, were dependent on the
body in the same way that the vegetative soul of a plant is dependent on the body of the plant
or the animal soul of an animal is dependent on the body of the animal, then the intellectual
part of the soul would surely perish on the death of the person.

We would now like to clarify a certain point. St Thomas Aquinas takes the position that the
intellectual part of the human soul, which we will describe in detail later, operates without
the body. That is, humans reason without the aid of the body, although they reason,
according to St Thomas, on the basis of sense-perceptions which necessarily come to them by
means of their bodily sense organs. St Thomas is quite clear on this: the intellectual
functions occur without the aid of the body, but the sensitive (the perceptual and other
animal) functions that humans share with the animals depend on the body, as, indeed, the
vegetative functions that men share with the plants.

This is a position of Aristotle. The doctrine of the independence of the mind (nous) from the
body can be found in On the Soul III, 4.[8] The doctrine that the mind (nous) survives the
body is found in remarks, undeveloped by Aristotle, that are scattered throughout On the
Soul.[9] In its final form, where only the active mind (nous) is immortal and eternal,
whereas the passive mind (nous) is corruptible, this doctrine is found in On the Soul III, 5.
[10]

St Thomas goes so far as willingly to remark that a certain function of the sensitive or animal
soul in man related to perceptual judgement (the ‘particular reason’) is said by the doctors of
his time to be a function of the mid-part of the head.[11] This is quite shrewd, for that part of
the brain does exercise perceptual judgement. However, the question arises: since we now
know—to the extent that we know anything—that the brain is implicated in reasoning, how
can St Thomas assert that the intellectual part of the soul is completely independent of the
body? For the assertion enters strongly into his argumentation for the subsistent nature of
the human soul and thence for the survival of that soul outside the body after death.

This is how Fr Copleston addresses the matter:

 It is clear, therefore, that the crucial point in Aquinas’ argument in favour of immortality [of the human
soul] is his argument in favour of the incorporeality or spirituality of the soul. For if it is spiritual in the
sense that its existence is not tied to the existence of the bodily organism or to any corporeal organ, its
persistence after death seems to follow.…

Aquinas’ argument in favour of the human soul’s spiritual character is based, as we have seen, on the
contention that man exercises psychical activities which are not intrinsically dependent on a corporeal
organ. He then argues that this fact shows that the ‘form’ which exercises these activities is itself
spiritual. His position would not involve him in denying that intellectual activity has a physical aspect,
in the sense that it is accompanied by movements in the brain. It would, however, commit him to
denying not only that intellectual activity can be identified with movements of the brain but also that it
is intrinsically dependent on these movements, in the sense that there cannot be intellectual activity of
any kind without them. In other words, he is committed to denying not only the outdated form of
materialism which is represented by Hobbe’s idea that thought is a motion in the head or by Cabanis’
dictum that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, but also the doctrine of
epiphenomenalism according to which the mind, though not a corporeal thing, supervenes when the
brain has reached a certain degree of development in the evolutionary process and cannot exist apart
from it. He is also committed, of course, to denying the validity of the analysis according to which the
word ‘mind’ is no more than a collective name for psychical events. But by denying the truth of such
views, Aquinas would deny the truth of the interpretations of the empirical data, not the empirical data
themselves. For example, it is doubtless true that intellectual activities [in the embryo, fœtus, etc.] are
found only when a corporeal organ has attained a certain degree of development. But to say that mind is
a kind of epiphenomenon or efflorescence of the brain is to enunciate a theory about the facts, an
interpretation of the facts, the meaning of which is by no means altogether clear and which is in any case
open to dispute. Again, the statement that ‘mind’ is no more than a collective term for psychical events
expresses a theory or interpretation, the validity of which is open to question. True, Aquinas’ account of
the nature of the soul also involves interpretation and theory; for on his own admission we have no
direct intuition of the soul as a spiritual ‘substance’. But my point is simply that his interpretation
cannot be ruled out simply because it is an interpretation. The question is which is the most adequate

interpretation.…[12]

Let us make some remarks here. We are not experts on St Thomas Aquinas. However, it
seems to us from reading the relevant passages of the Summa that Fr Copleston is
minimizing the radical nature of St Thomas’ assertion that the intellectual part of the soul
does not depend (essentially) on the body. True, there might, in Aristotelian categories of
thought, be an accidental concomitance of brain function with the operations of the
intellectual part of the soul without any damage being done to St Thomas’ position, but, it
seems to us, they would have to remain accidental for St Thomas’ position to be valid. Fr
Copleston, it seems to us, is minimizing this ‘essential – accidental’ distinction when he says:
‘His position would not involve him in denying that intellectual activity has a physical aspect,
in the sense that it is accompanied by movements in the brain.’ It seems to us that this is one
area in which the Thomist needs to consider the data of modern science.

Next, the reader may recall our brief discussion in Chapter I of Le hasard et la nécessité,
written by the Nobel laureate, Jacques Monod.[13] There we remarked that Monod taught a
doctrine of epiphenomenalism with regard to the nature of the human mind. Here we see a
clear description of that doctrine, one which agrees quite closely with Monod’s own doctrine
of the development in evolution of the mind of man.

To continue with St Thomas, St Thomas next asserts, quoting St Augustine, that a man is not
merely his soul but his body and soul taken together.[14] This is also a position of St Gregory
of Nyssa, as we saw in Chapter III, above, in discussing St Gregory’s remarks in On the
Making of Man concerning the conception of each individual man. However, St Thomas
takes the unity of body and soul much further than St Augustine or St Gregory.

It might be remarked, moreover, that St Thomas insists on the unity of body and soul on
account of his Aristotelian metaphysic. For we see that St Thomas denies that the soul has
either corporeal or spiritual matter, and that because the soul is the form of the body.[15]
Here, St Thomas departs somewhat from St Augustine and the Augustinian tradition: St
Augustine, following a Platonic doctrine, had taught that the soul was an autonomous
substance which used the body as a tool; and certain mediæval Scholastics who were his
followers, including St Bonaventure and, later, St John Duns Scotus, taught that the soul was
composed of a spiritual matter. St John of Damascus also teaches a similar doctrine of the
semi-materiality of the soul, but for a somewhat different reason: only God is truly
immaterial; hence by comparison with God, angels and souls are somewhat material and
gross, although by comparison with the matter of the body they are immaterial.

It is sometimes taught in Orthodoxy, for example among Elders with clairvoyance and in the
Spiritual Homilies of St Makarios, that the soul has the same appearance as the body of the
person whose soul it is.[16]

St Thomas goes on to say that only if the intellectual part of the soul were immaterial could it
cognize the intelligible nature or essence of, say, a stone, something it manifestly can do.[17]
St Thomas addresses the difference between animals and men.[18] He remarks that as
concerns their bodies, both animals and men are taken from ‘the dust of the earth’ (Gen. 2,
7). However, the soul of the animal is but the result of a certain ‘corporeal virtue’, whereas
the soul of man is ‘from God’. In support of this distinction, St Thomas adduces the passage,
Gen. 1, 24, ‘Let the earth bring forth [every] living soul,’ as referring to the animals, and the
passage, Gen. 2, 7, ‘He blew into his face a breath of life,’ as referring to man. It should be
noted that St Thomas later states clearly that the soul of man is created and not of the same
substance as God.

St Thomas remarks that when the soul is out of the body (after death), then it possesses an
angel-like mode of comprehension.[19]

St Thomas goes on to say that the human soul is incorruptible.[20] This is an Augustinian
position.

However, he denies that the soul and the angel are of the same species.[21] In ordinary
language, this means that there is an essential difference between the human soul and the
angel.

Part of St Thomas’ reasoning in support of his position on the difference between the human
soul and the angel is important: while the angel can cognize intelligible realities intuitively or
directly, in this life the human soul naturally cannot. This is one of many places where St
Thomas insists that in this life the human soul cannot naturally cognize intelligible realities
intuitively or directly. We will see that according to St Thomas, only by means of abstraction
of the concept from the data of sense-perception and then by the operation of human reason
(syllogistic reasoning or ratiocination) on propositions based on concepts derived in this way
can the human being in this life know intelligible realities, insofar as he can in this life.

This is clearly of great importance to us in the theory of asceticism, for the program of
Evagrius Pontikos[22] and, following him, St Hesychios,[23] and indeed the Egyptian
Fathers, as a reading of the homilies of Abba Isaiah[24] will convince the reader, is the
divestiture by the ascetic of the data of sense-perception in order for the ascetic directly or
intuitively to cognize intelligible realities. This is also the import of St Gregory of Nyssa’s
own doctrine of mystical ascent.

St Thomas then refers by author, title and chapters to Origen’s Peri Archon, to the places
where Origen develops his doctrine that human souls and angels are of the same species.[25]
This is the cosmological doctrine that men and angels are minds (noes) of the same kind, a
doctrine that in Chapter III, above, we saw to be expounded by Evagrius Pontikos in the
Kephalaia Gnostica; this is a doctrine that was condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.

It should be noted, however, that the Fifth Ecumenical Synod nowhere addressed or
condemned the notion that the human being could in this life attain to an intuitive cognition
of intelligible realities; that is an issue different from the cosmological issue of the supposed
identity of human souls and angels. It seems to us that the denial of the possibility of a
natural intuitive cognition of intelligible realities by humans in this life is St Thomas’
personal Aristotelian position, one in which he departs from the older tradition of the
Roman Catholic Church as represented by St Augustine. That is, this is St Thomas’
Aristotelianism as applied to human cognitive psychology.

The question whether man can know God directly is somewhat more complex: St Augustine
certainly taught that the mystical experience or sight of God himself was possible in this life,
but he certainly also reserved the fullness of it for the next life.

St Thomas then discusses the nature of the union of the soul with the body.[26] Here his
analysis is very detailed and depends on Aristotle’s psychology and metaphysics; we cannot
hope to present his analysis in detail. His first position is that the intellectual part of man is
united to the body as form to matter.[27] The significance of this can be seen in the fact that
this position entails a rejection of the Platonic doctrine that the soul uses the body as a tool,
that the soul dwells in the body as in a house, that the soul merely puts the body into motion.
For St Thomas, following the metaphysic of Aristotle, the connection between the soul and
the body is quite importantly different. Unfortunately, it is impossible to convey the nuances
of St Thomas’ thought on this matter without a thorough introduction to Aristotelian
metaphysics. Suffice it to say that in one of the passages of On the Making of Man that we
quoted in Chapter III, above, St Gregory of Nyssa clearly stated that the soul used the body
just as a flutist uses the flute. Moreover, St Augustine very clearly teaches a Platonic doctrine
of the relation of the soul to the body, insisting that the soul uses the body as a tool. And we
have seen in Chapter III that Evagrius teaches that the soul dwells in the body as in a house.

There is in the authors a completely different orientation, the difference being precisely that
between Plato (St Gregory of Nyssa, St Macrina, St Augustine and even Evagrius) and
Aristotle (St Thomas Aquinas). However, it seems to us that, if it be possible, St Augustine is
on this matter even more Platonically oriented than the Orthodox Church. However, it would
take us far afield of our goal to pursue the matter of St Augustine’s dependence on Plotinus,
the Neoplatonist.

However let us here present a summary of St Augustine’s anthropology: Man is composed of

body, soul and spirit. The body is material. The soul itself is an autonomous, immaterial
substance. It is immortal and incorruptible. Without the body and soul, there is not man.
The soul contains the vivificatory function; it is the vital principle in man. The soul is in every
part of the body taken as a whole and in every part of the body taken in particular. Man has
only one soul, which is an intelligible substance made to rule the body: ‘Therefore man, as he
appears to man, is a rational soul using a mortal and earthen body.’[28] The soul is a rational
and intelligent substance from the beginning of its existence, although its reason and
intelligence are dormant. St Augustine treats the nature of the union of the substantial soul
with the body which it animates as a profound mystery. However, the relation of the soul to
the body is that of the artisan to his tool. St Augustine is quite explicitly Platonic on this
point, even more so, in our view, than St Gregory of Nyssa. As Gilson says: ‘This definition of
man, where the emphasis is placed with such insistence on the hierarchical transcendence of
the soul with respect to the body, accords with the profound tendencies of
Augustinianism.’[29] The spirit, in the sense that interests us here, is the rational part of
man.

In discussing his own point of view, St Thomas observes that the nature of any object
whatsoever is manifested by that object’s operation.[30] But, he says, the proper operation of
man, insofar as he is man, is to understand, through which thing he transcends all the other
animals. This is very important to grasp: it is the mind (Latin: mens; = Greek: nous) which
makes man different from the other animals. In this, both St Thomas and St Gregory of
Nyssa agree. Moreover, one of the foundations of St Augustine’s Trinitarian theology is the
notion that it is the mind (mens) of man which is the image of God in man: St Augustine
takes this doctrine so far as to derive the mutual relations of the Persons of the Trinity from
the triadic relations he discerns within the human mind (mens) and its operations, this
approach being valid, in his view, precisely because the human mind (mens) is an image of
the Holy Trinity. This identification by St Augustine of the image of God in man with the
mind (mens) would not be possible if the mind (mens) were not the distinctively human part
of man, for the image of God must reside in what is human in man. However, we shall see
that the interpretation of what ‘mind’ is differs among the three theologians: St Thomas
Aquinas, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine.

St Thomas states that although by its nature the human soul is made to be united to the
body, it can exist outside the body, even though that is not its natural state.[31] Of course, St
Thomas here wishes to preserve the survival of the human soul after death. In this he is
departing from Aristotle’s psychology—although Aristotle himself is ambiguous on the
matter[32]—as he does whenever he wishes to preserve an aspect of his psychology which he
considers to be demanded by Christian revelation but which is not to be found in Aristotle.

[1] ST Ia, 75. Let us make a brief remark on references to the Summa for those who are not familiar with the work. The
Summa is divided into three parts. The second part is divided into two sub-parts. Each part or sub-part is divided into a
numbered series of questions, and each question has a variable number of articles (or sub-questions), which are
themselves numbered. Within each article, St Thomas follows a fixed form: He presents an assertion that something
seems to be or not to be the case. This assertion is always the contrary of his own opinion. He then presents a numbered
list of assertions from his philosophical or theological opponents or predecessors which support the opinion contrary to
his own. These are called the objections. He then presents his own opinion in the contrary assertion, and proceeds to
develop it in the body of the article. He then presents one by one his reasoned replies to the objections. Thus, references
to the Summa have the form ST Ia, 85, 1 or ST Ia IIae 10, 2, ad 1, where, in the first example, the ST refers, or course, to
the Summa Theologiae, the Ia refers to the first part (which has no sub-parts), the 85 refers to Question 85 and the 1
refers to Article 1 within the question (implicitly, to the body of the article); or, where, in the second example, the
reference is to the first sub-part of the second part of the Summa, Question 10, Article 2, Reply to Objection 1. Reference
to any edition of the Summa will make the matter clear.

Chapter IV -- 5

St Thomas next[1] denies the position of Averroës (1126–98), the Muslim philosopher, that
all men share in a single ‘active intellect’, a position based by Averroës on his own
interpretation of a passage of Aristotle which concerns the ‘active mind (nous)’, a passage of
Aristotle which has always been in dispute.[2] That is, St Thomas’ position is that each man
has his own ‘active intellect’ and does not merely share in a universal ‘active intellect’. While
today we might take this position to be obvious, it is well to remark that Averroës, for
example, did not.

Moreover, the significance of St Thomas’ assertion can be seen by considering the concept of
the ‘collective unconscious’ of C. G. Jung. If we take the ‘collective unconscious’ of Jung to be
a supra-individual unconscious in which individual men participate, then Jung’s doctrine is
similar to that of Averroës. If we take Jung merely to mean that each man has a personal
‘copy’ of the ‘collective unconscious’ which is filled with ‘archetypes’ in the nature of innate
ideas or models of human psychological tendencies, then again we find St Thomas to be in
disagreement: he also rejects, on the basis of his Aristotelian realism, the notion of innate
ideas. It might be remarked further that in Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis,
the concept of the personal unconscious is somewhat different than that of the collective
unconscious in Jung: it is more in the nature of a principle of the unconscious structuring or
determining of the behaviour of the individual by structural tendencies in the psychology of
man.

We here see an important point: The doctrine that men do not participate in a collective
mind or even in a collective unconscious has today in the West by and large come to be the
dominant model of man, even in everyday life. One could conceive of a different historical
trend in a different cultural milieu which would have left a legacy of a different view of man.
These anthropological positions of St Thomas Aquinas, whether they are the source or an
intermediary or merely a manifestation of an underlying tendency in Western thought, have
come to be so deeply rooted in the Western conception of man that today we take them for
granted without serious examination.

St Thomas next makes a very important assertion: each man has only one soul.[3] Now this
may also seem gratuitously obvious to us, but the discussion of it is very important. For we
saw in Chapter II, above, that St Macrina, following Aristotle, described the vegetative,
animal and human souls as forming, in creation, a hierarchy. The reader will recall that St
Macrina adapted that aspect of Aristotle’s psychology to the Genesis account of creation in
order to explain the origin of the passions, stating clearly that each man had the functions of
the animal soul in him and that this presence of the functions of the animal soul in him was
the origin of the passions in man.
St Thomas is addressing the same notions and discussing what it means for a human being
to have vegetative and animal functions in himself in addition to the distinctively human
function of, for St Thomas, intellectual understanding. For, St Thomas says, this cannot
mean that the human has a vegetative soul and an animal soul and a human or intellectual
soul—three souls. That, he says, would be absurd. The mature man has only one soul, the
intellectual soul, but that intellectual soul possesses all the functions (or, powers) of the
vegetative and animal souls, just as the animal soul—of a tiger, say—also possesses all the
functions of the vegetative soul. Moreover, St Thomas says, the human soul possesses, as do
the animal and vegetative souls, all the lower functions required by Aristotelian metaphysics
for a complete account of an existent being.

The reason St Thomas adduces for his position is that an argument for multiple souls would
work under the Platonic conception of the soul, which views the soul as a separate substance
which moves the body, but not under the Aristotelian conception of the soul as the form of
the body. Indeed, St Thomas asserts that Plato taught that a man had a multitude of souls of
different kinds.

It must be understood here what form means to Aristotle and to St Thomas. The classic
metaphor, due to Aristotle himself, is that the form is like the form of the man that will be
placed in the marble or bronze to make the statue: the marble or bronze is the matter of the
statue. The actual subsistent being is the statue of the man, made up of form—the shape of
the man—and matter—the marble or the bronze. The completed statue is the actual
substance, the thing that actually exists: the form, although real, can be separated from the
matter only in thought, not in act. That is, it is the complete statue of the man that exists and
we can separate the form of the statue, the shape of the man, from the matter of the statue,
the marble or bronze, only in our thought and not in our actions, although the shape of the
man is real and not fictitious. This is evident: the shape of the man is there, but we cannot
abstract it from the marble or bronze except in our thought. This of course is Aristotelian
realism. The relation of form and matter between the soul and the body is a much closer
relation between soul and body than the relation posited, according to St Thomas, by the
Platonic conception of the soul as a separate substance that moves the body. The Platonic
conception of the soul is much closer, we ourselves might say, to the ‘ghost in the machine’
that has been attacked by materialistic philosophers even in our own time than is the
Aristotelian conception of the soul.
Now the matter is somewhat complicated by the nature, according to St Thomas, of the
human intellectual soul in relation to the vegetative and animal souls. For the vegetative and
animal souls are strictly forms in the sense that they have no autonomous or subsistent
existence apart from the matter of the body of the plant or animal whose form they are: they
are separated from the matter of the plant or animal only in our thought, in our
consideration of the living plant or living animal, and when the plant or animal dies, then its
form or soul ceases to be. But the human intellectual soul is subsistent: it continues to exist
after the death of the man.

Both Aristotle, and, following him, St Thomas, consider that the vegetative or animal soul
ceases to be when the plant or animal dies. St Thomas expresses this by saying that the
vegetative and animal souls are not subsistent. Of course, in St Thomas’ doctrine, since the
human soul is subsistent, it is not like the vegetative or animal soul, and this requires a
further analysis.

St Thomas formally asserts that there is only one substantial form in a man, his intellectual
soul; that that soul contains ‘by virtue’—by its operations, by its faculties—the nutritive
(vegetative) and sensitive (animal) souls and also all the other inferior forms required by
Aristotelian metaphysics; and that that soul, by itself only, does all that the inferior forms do
in other earthly creatures.[4] What St Thomas means is this: the human intellectual soul is
distinctive in that it is a substantial form which possesses the power of ratiocination, and it is
the only soul that a mature man has; but that substantial form also possesses the functions of
the vegetative and animal souls, and indeed all the functions of all the inferior forms. St
Thomas needs to say this for the following reason: The characteristic of the human soul is
that it is intellectual, and explicitly in St Thomas’ thought this has nothing to do with the
vegetative or animal functions, nor, as we have seen, does the human intellect have any
dependence on the body. Hence, it is necessary for St Thomas to assert that that intellectual
soul possesses the lower functions or powers also, in order to account for the vegetative and
animal functions that are connected to the body and that men obviously have (for example,
nutrition and sense-perception), and for all the other inferior functions that would be needed
to give an account of a whole living man composed of soul and body and dwelling on the face
of the earth—but without for all that conceding that the human being has more than one
soul. This doctrine was challenged by later Scholastics working in the Augustinian tradition.
This doctrine of St Thomas is important for an understanding of the concept of brain death.
For since there is only one soul in a man, which accounts for all aspects of his being alive—
and indeed, for all aspects of his being—, St Thomas’ doctrine does not allow for the
conceptual separation of the higher intellectual or personal functions of the man from the
lower vegetative or animal functions, which is what is done by the doctor in defining the
concept of brain death. For the doctor proposes to measure electrically the higher brain
centres, thereby to ascertain whether the patient has these higher centres in operation. The
doctor assumes that the lower brain functions are functioning, those that account, in St
Thomas’ and Aristotle’s terminology, for the vegetative functions of the patient: pulse and
respiration and such-like. The doctor then proposes to declare the person dead when he
establishes that the higher brain functions are no longer present, although the lower brain
functions are. But St Thomas’ doctrine of the unity of the human soul does not permit this: if
the lower functions of the brain are in operation, that is only possible, on his account of the
human soul, if the human soul is present in its entirety: the human soul accounts for all the
lively functions of the patient and that soul is one. Hence, the soul of the patient is either
present, in which case the higher functions are merely hidden by the damage to the body—a
position taken by Aristotle himself with respect to the sight of man in cases of damage to the
eye, and by St Thomas himself with respect to the functioning of the intellect in cases of
damage to the body[5]—or the soul of the patient is absent and the person is dead: all lively
functions, whether intellectual, animal or vegetative, have stopped, including pulse and
respiration. But this is certainly not the position of the doctor enunciating the doctrine of
brain death. Moreover, since St Thomas explicitly asserts that the higher intellectual
functions of man do not depend on the body, on his account of the human soul the presence
or absence of those higher functions cannot be determined by a measurement of the
electrical activity of the cerebral cortex or, indeed, of any other part of the body.

In his view of the unity of the human soul, St Thomas is quite similar in intent to St Gregory
of Nyssa in On the Making of Man. The difference is one of emphasis and philosophical
orientation. For St Gregory of Nyssa clearly takes the position that the soul is one and that it
is present even in cases where damage to the body prevents expression of the powers of the
soul.[6] St Augustine also takes the position that the human soul is one.

St Thomas makes the very important assertion, one that in Chapter III we already saw St
Gregory of Nyssa to make in On the Making of Man, that a man’s soul is completely
contained in every part of the man’s body.[7] The similarity of the two doctrines might seem
striking to the reader but the fact that St Thomas quotes St Augustine in expounding his own
position should alert us that St Thomas’ position is derived from St Augustine. For St
Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine are both considered to be Neoplatonists: the close
similarities between the doctrines of St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine seem to arise on
the one hand from the common doctrine of the Church—St Gregory of Nyssa and St
Augustine were roughly contemporary—and on the other hand from the reliance of each on
Neoplatonism. One might say that the close similarities between the anthropological
doctrines of St Thomas Aquinas and St Gregory of Nyssa arise from the reception by St
Thomas Aquinas of positions of St Augustine, which positions have the relation to those of St
Gregory of Nyssa that we have just stated; and that many of the differences between the
anthropological doctrines of St Thomas Aquinas and the anthropological doctrines of the
Orthodox Church arise from St Thomas Aquinas’ modifications of Augustinian positions in
order to adapt them to Aristotelianism as he understands it.

St Thomas then turns to a general discussion of the powers of the human soul.[8] For the
most part, this discussion is quite theoretical. However, St Thomas formally asserts that the
soul has many powers.[9] These powers might be considered to be faculties. Here, it is well
to remark that for St Thomas the soul is simple and not complex, just as it was for St
Macrina, and just as is was for St Augustine. Hence, these powers cannot be considered to be
different compartments of the intelligible soul in the way that the body has different organs
located in different spatial positions: they are powers of the soul in the sense that they are
things that the soul can do.

Since these powers are discovered by St Thomas by logical analysis—following Aristotle

surely—it might be thought that these powers are really without objective reality, that they
are nothing more than the fruit of a logical analysis of human actions and behaviour, or even
of a logical analysis of the way we speak about human actions and behaviour. However, St
Thomas clearly intends us to understand that these powers are objectively real. This of
course is his Aristotelian realism. In no way would he wish us to understand that his analysis
was conventional or arbitrary, nor would he consider that he was merely providing an
analysis of how we talk about human actions in ordinary language: he believes that he is
providing an objective analysis of the real powers, or capacities, or capabilities, or modes of
operation, of the human soul. Moreover, St Thomas not only takes his realism for granted,
but he also assumes that by logical analysis, sometimes of a very minute kind, he can
determine the objectively real relations of these powers of the soul the one to the other and
to other objects in his Aristotelian metaphysical speculation. The result is an extremely
detailed analysis of human action based on these powers, on their mutual relations and on
their relations to other objects in Thomist metaphysics.

St Thomas asserts that these powers are distinguished the one from the other both in terms
of their objects (what things they work on) and in terms of their actual operations (what they
actually do).[10]

Moreover, St Thomas asserts that these powers have an order among themselves.[11] Here
we see an aspect of St Thomas’ thinking which gives it its particular or peculiar character:
this very detailed analysis and ranking of abstract objects such as the powers of the human
soul.

St Thomas asserts that the subject (Latin: subjectum) of the powers of the soul is not the
soul, but the whole composite of body and soul.[12] Here it might be remarked that in
Chapter II, we ourselves, following the analysis of St Macrina and her brother St Gregory of
Nyssa, developed the doctrine that the person was to be identified with the mind (nous). This
is a more Platonic doctrine. St Augustine also has this orientation: much of his thought
would be unintelligible without such an identification of the person with the person’s
conscious experience of his own mind (mens). St Thomas, however, asserts that the subject—
we ourselves take this to be equivalent to person—is the composite of body and soul. That the
distinctive part of the human soul is the mind (nous) is not in issue here; St Gregory of
Nyssa, St Augustine and St Thomas are in agreement on that point; what is in issue is how
we are to identify the person. The concept of the person has implications both in bioethics
and in the doctrine of prayer.

When we discuss St Thomas’ theory of action, we shall see that this doctrine that the subject
(subjectum) is the composite of body and soul creates an ambiguity in his analysis of the
mutual relations of the intellect and the will in a human action. For St Thomas analyses very
minutely, in the way we have just mentioned, the mutual interactions of the intellect and the
will when a person is coming to do a human action. But the question arises: in these mutual
interactions of the intellect and the will, where is the humanly free person?
St Thomas asserts that when the soul departs at death from the body, then the soul loses
those powers which depend on the body—that is, all those powers, other than the intellectual
ones, that have been referred to above.[13] The importance of St Thomas’ previous assertion
that the intellectual functions of man in no way depend on the body can be seen here, for
according to St Thomas’ own argumentation, if the intellectual functions of the soul
depended necessarily on any part of the body, then they too would cease operation when the
soul departed from the body, something that would be contrary to his doctrine of the survival
after death of the soul in a conscious condition.

The reader may recall from Chapter I that St Macrina attacked a notion, evidently due to
Epicurus, that when a man died, then his soul dissipated. Of course, Epicurus viewed the
human soul as something material, something that would dissipate like a gas, whereas St
Thomas, following Aristotle, has a more sophisticated conception of the vegetative or animal
soul as the form of the plant or animal. And, of course, St Thomas is preserving the survival
of the human soul after death: he is merely asserting that the human soul loses those
vegetative, animal and other inferior functions that depend on the body even though it
retains the essentially human function of the intellect, which function, of course, does not in
his view depend in any way on the body.

Recall that St Thomas has already remarked that when the human soul departs from the
body, then it understands intuitively in an angel-like manner. This can now be seen to be
necessary for St Thomas to assert, since, by his own admission, the soul after death no longer
has the possibility of understanding by means of the sense-perceptions that it had when it
was in the body, those powers related to sense-perception having been lost along with all the
other powers that it had which depended on the body. This doctrine did not receive universal
approbation from later Scholastics.

However, St Thomas goes on to say that the human soul, when it departs from the body,
bears with it ‘by virtue’ those lower powers that it has lost.[14] That is to say, since the soul
no longer is united to the body, these powers can no longer be exercised, but, were the soul
once again to be united to the body, then these powers would once again be able to operate.
His comment on this point is very brief.
It is well to recall from Chapter III, that, in Chapter 15 of On the Making of Man, St Gregory
of Nyssa asserts that the mind (nous) is the true soul and that the lower powers of the soul—
the functions which correspond in man to the vegetative and animal souls—are ‘but a certain
enlivening operation which has been honoured together with the name of the soul’.[15] Now,
strange as it may seem, a Platonically-oriented Cappadocian of the Fourth Century and a
mediæval Scholastic Italian of the Thirteenth Century rigorously following Aristotle and
working largely at the University of Paris are largely in agreement on the matter. For if we
except the different modes of expression, then both St Gregory of Nyssa and St Thomas are
saying the same thing: for both, what is essentially human is the mind (Latin: mens; =
Greek: nous); however, the human soul also possesses the vegetative and animal functions
associated with the Aristotelian typology of the vegetative, animal and human souls. Both St
Gregory of Nyssa and St Thomas want to assert, however, that these lower functions are not
intrinsic to the human identity of the human soul. This is but one of the places where we see
the striking resemblance that we have already noted between the anthropology of St Thomas
and that of St Gregory of Nyssa, a resemblance that we have taken to be due to St Thomas’
dogmatic dependence on St Augustine.

Chapter IV -- 6

However, strangely enough, St Thomas’ doctrine of the human soul does not in his view
imply that the full human soul comes to exist in the embryo at conception. In an astonishing
development, St Thomas takes the position that the human soul does not come to exist in the
embryo at the moment of conception, but in the following rather unusual way: The semen
contains a ‘corporeal virtue’, which is neither the animal soul nor a part of it—this corporeal
virtue could be construed by us today to be the biochemistry of the sperm and egg—which
corporeal virtue leads to the generation of the vegetative soul as the form of the embryo,
upon which generation the corporeal virtue dissipates with the semen. This vegetative soul
later ceases to be and is replaced by the animal soul. Then, at a certain time in development,
the animal soul in turn ceases to be and is replaced by the human intellectual soul. The
human intellectual soul itself is created by God at that instant that it replaces the animal soul
in the embryo or fœtus. St Thomas is not specific when this creation of the human
intellectual soul occurs, but his position implies that the human embryo is not fully human
until some time after conception.[1]
As far as we ourselves know, this position of St Thomas has never been received by the
Roman Catholic Church, at least not in its obvious implications; for if it had, then, it seems to
us, the Roman Catholic Church would have a much milder position on abortions early in
pregnancy and on other such matters, positions which it does not in the least have. Of
course, it is possible that the Roman Catholic Church formally accepts St Thomas’ reasoning
on the matter but takes the moral positions it does on the basis of other reasonings, perhaps
even based on other parts of St Thomas’ own work, we do not know.

Moreover, we saw in Chapter III that certain theologians in the Roman Catholic Church wish
to revise the date of human conception so that it would occur at the time of implantation of
the embryo into the wall of the uterus on about day 12 after fertilization, thus to open the
door to abortion and other such practices forbidden by the Roman Catholic Church.[2] It
seems to us that if the theologians in question were familiar with the above reasoning of St
Thomas and if that reasoning were formally the position of the Roman Catholic Church
without there being any other reasoning which negated its implications for bioethics, then
the theologians in question would have made use of St Thomas’ model for the purposes of
their argumentation. For the theologians in question argue that the embryo does not receive
its (human) soul until the embryo implants itself into the uterus; until then, they say, it is
merely a mass of undifferentiated cells. In Thomist terms, these theologians should be able
to argue that until implantation in the uterus that mass of cells has only the corporeal virtue,
or only the vegetative soul, or only the animal soul, and that the human intellectual soul has
not yet been created by God. They should then be able to argue that aborting an embryo
would be no more than excising a piece of tissue if it were done at the beginning of
pregnancy, pulling a weed if it were done early in pregnancy, or swatting a fly if it were done
somewhat later in pregnancy: for only when the human intellectual soul were created by God
sometime after normal conception could the embryo be deemed fully human. Although the
conceptus certainly would be from the moment of fertilization a humanly conceived embryo
on its way to becoming a full human being, the theologians in question are anxious to deny it
human status until the moment of its implantation in the uterus. But in their argumentation
these theologians do not seem to make use of St Thomas’ doctrine of the succession of souls,
[3] and this makes us wonder about the fate of this Thomist idea in Roman Catholic
theology.[4]
The reader may recall from Chapter III that St Gregory of Nyssa takes the position in On the
Making of Man that the complete human soul comes into existence at the instant of
conception and that it is joined at that same instant to the body, but that its higher functions
manifest themselves only when the body has developed sufficiently to support those
functions—without for all that, St Gregory says, the entire soul not being present from the
moment of conception. Thus, in St Gregory’s view, the vegetative functions of the soul
manifest themselves first, then the animal functions, then the human functions, in
proportion to the development of the body that allows those functions or powers to express
themselves—without for all that the full human soul not being present in the embryo from
the moment of conception.

It might also be remarked that the canons of the Orthodox Church, including the canons of
St Basil the Great, St Gregory of Nyssa’s brother, have always forbidden abortion from the
moment of conception, the position clearly being taken that the embryo is a full human being
from the moment of conception. Indeed, the doctrine of St Basil the Great that the human
nature of Christ was divinized from the moment of Christ’s conception depends on St Basil’s
understanding that what was conceived in the womb of Mary was a full human being from
the moment of its conception. If St Thomas’ doctrine were valid, at least in what it appears to
say, then the doctrine of St Basil the Great would be nonsense.[5]

While we by no means have the subtlety necessary to comment on St Thomas’ thinking, it

seems to us that the reason that St Thomas took the position he did on the succession of
souls was that asserting that the whole human soul was created by God at the moment of
conception, although its higher functions did not manifest themselves until the development
of the embryo permitted, would have come into conflict with his Aristotelian metaphysics.
We are not able to say with certainty what that conflict might be. It might be that because St
Thomas viewed the soul to be the form of the body, then in his view it would be impossible
for such a form, even a subsistent, substantial form such as the human intellectual soul, to
exist as the form of a body which did not yet have that form: in other words, he might have
felt it absurd to assert that the powers of the animal soul existed which conferred on the
embryo the power, say, to see, before the embryo had actually developed eyes with which to
see; or that the intellectual soul existed which conferred on the embryo the power to think,
before the embryo actually had a sufficiently developed nervous system.[6] Perhaps a
Thomist can explain the matter.
Let us note that St Thomas clearly takes the position that any subsistent form such as the
human soul or an angel can only come into existence by a creative act of God, that is, by an
individual act of creation.[7] Following, again, his Christianized Aristotelian metaphysics, he
denies that there is any other way that such a subsistent form—that is, a form which can
subsist independently of matter—can come into existence.

In Chapter III, above, we discussed St Gregory of Nyssa’s own theory that the human soul
was transmitted with the male sperm at the moment of conception. We also discussed there
the limitations of St Gregory’s theory, even in view of the actual practice today of cloning
humans by transplanting the nucleus of a somatic cell of a donor into a denucleated,
unfertilized human egg.

Curiously enough, whatever its other theoretical weaknesses, St Thomas’ doctrine of the
succession of souls is more adaptable to the question of ‘parthenogenetic cloning’[8] than
any other doctrine concerning the origin of the human soul at conception. For St Thomas’
notion of the ‘corporeal virtue’ could easily be adapted to the data of the molecular biology of
the cloning procedure, as could his doctrine of the succession of the vegetative and animal
souls followed by the creation by God of the human soul. But, apart from this ease of
adaptation, St Thomas’ doctrine does not agree with the teaching of the Orthodox Church,
which follows St Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine that the whole human soul comes to exist in the
conceptus at the instant of conception. Of course, in practice in the Orthodox Church, the
Nyssian doctrine that the soul is transmitted with the male sperm at the moment of
conception is usually replaced with the doctrine that that human soul is created by God at
the moment of conception, most likely under the influence of Roman Catholic mediæval
Scholastic theology. Of course, in either case, the doctrine that the human soul comes to exist
at the moment of conception leaves open the question of what happens in the case of
‘parthenogenetic cloning’.

Let us also note that St Thomas and St Gregory of Nyssa both consider the male sperm
sufficient for the generation of a human being (apart from that aspect in St Thomas of the
creation by God of the human soul sometime after conception). St Thomas is clear, evidently
following Aristotle, that the woman provides the matter for the embryo to grow.[9] It is in
this sense that he interprets the passage of Genesis[10] which makes of Eve a ‘helper’ for
Adam: the woman ‘helps’ the man in the process of generation of a new human being by
providing the matter for the embryo to grow.[11] Of course, here we see both St Thomas and
St Gregory of Nyssa to be limited by the biological knowledge of their time.

In Introduction a l’Étude de Saint Augustin,[12] on which we have relied for our

understanding of St Augustine’s anthropology and psychology, we find a somewhat
ambiguous presentation of St Augustine’s views on the origin of the human soul. Gilson
reports that St Augustine recognized four hypotheses, concerning how God created the souls,
tending to but never definitively adopting the first. These four hypotheses are:

1. When God created the first human soul, that of Adam, God created all the other
souls in it once and for all. This is to be taken as the basis of a doctrine of the
transmission of the soul with the sperm, such as St Gregory of Nyssa taught.
However, St Gregory himself did not espouse the actual pre-existence of souls,
but their virtual pre-existence through the foreknowledge of God.

2. God creates the soul of each individual expressly for him (presumably at his
conception).

3. All the souls, after having pre-existed in God, are sent by him to the bodies
which they must animate.

4. All the souls, after having pre-existed in God, descend voluntarily so as to

animate the bodies.[13]

However, Gilson elsewhere[14] states that St Augustine taught in his commentary on Genesis
that all the souls of men were created together during the six days of creation, before they
were or are inserted into their bodies, which bodies are of course created at the moment of
conception, or, in the case of Adam and Eve, at the moment that God made their bodies. This
appears to be the basis of hypotheses 3 and 4 above.

Of course, the Fifth Ecumenical Synod, which took place after St Augustine’s death,
condemned the notion of the pre-existence of souls, and hence, by extension, the notion that
all the souls of men were created together in the way suggested by St Augustine. Of course, it
is clear from what we have seen in Chapter III, above, that this condemnation by the Synod
was set into the context of the Origenism of the epoch of the Synod, from which Origenism
just as clearly St Augustine is completely free, but the decision of the Synod has always been
taken in the Orthodox Church as condemning every notion of the existence of the human
soul prior to the conception of the man whose soul it is. We will see in Chapter V that St John
of Damascus takes the condemnation in this sense, although he does in a general way refer to
Origen.

[3] At least insofar as Breck presents their views.

[4] Breck p. 140 indicates that the notion that the human intellectual soul is infused into the human body sometime
after conception is still a live issue in Roman Catholic theology.

[5] We will discuss the Orthodox doctrine of divinization (theosis) in Chapter V.

[6] Recall that in St Thomas, the mind of man makes use of bodily-based perceptual functions.

[8] What we have just described, i.e. Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT).

Chapter IV -- 7

St Thomas next turns in detail to the powers of the soul.[1] His discussion is very important.
He follows Aristotle quite closely.

St Thomas distinguishes five genera (main kinds) of powers of the human soul: the
vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive and intellectual.[2]

Since we will not otherwise discuss the locomotive power of the soul except implicitly when
we discuss St Thomas’ theory of action, let us remark here that it is the power of the human
to move from place to place, which power the soul shares with the (perfect) animals.
It should be understood here that St Thomas is adopting the full Aristotelian model of
human psychology, and that, while Aristotle included the faculties (mind, temper and desire)
that his master, Plato, defined, his model is more complex, including other faculties. Hence,
we encounter in St Thomas—and even in St John of Damascus, another Aristotelian—
faculties of the human soul that are not addressed by St Gregory of Nyssa or St Augustine,
who give a more Platonic account of human psychology.

St Thomas divides the vegetative powers of the soul into the nutritive, augmentative and
generative powers.[3] These are merely the three main functions of plants that even St
Macrina alluded to in her adaptation of Aristotelian psychology to the Genesis account of
creation. Plants maintain themselves by taking in nourishment through their roots and by
completing its processing in their leaves and fruit; they grow larger; they reproduce
themselves by means of their seeds. These three powers are common to all living things on
the face of the earth: plants, animals and men. Even viruses in some fashion manifest these
three powers.

St Thomas then turns to the sensitive powers of the soul.[4] He first distinguishes the five
external senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These are obvious. Man possesses
these five external senses in common with the higher animals, even if many of the lower
animals do not possess all of them in fullness.

In an important development, St Thomas distinguishes, still discussing the sensitive or

animal powers of the soul, four separate internal senses of the soul: the ‘common sense’, the
‘fantasy’, the ‘estimative power’ and the ‘memorative power’.[5] It must be emphasized that,
for St Thomas, following Aristotle, these four internal senses are related to the sensitive or
perceptual powers of the soul and have nothing to do with the spiritual senses that in
Chapter III we encountered in the Kephalaia Gnostica of Evagrius Pontikos or that we will
encounter in Chapter V. They arise from Aristotle’s and St Thomas’ analyses of how humans
and animals perceive and act on their perceptions. It is well to spend some time on these
internal senses, for they are important.

The common sense has nothing to do with prudence. It works in this way: Let us suppose
that we have before us a man who is speaking. Then by means of our external sense of sight
we have a visual sense-perception of the man, and by means of our external sense of hearing
we have an auricular sense-perception of his speech. But we do not experience in our
consciousness two separate, unconnected sense-perceptions: the one, the sight of the man (a
visual perception); the other, the sound of the man speaking (an auricular perception). We
have a unified sense-perception of a man speaking. It is the common sense which integrates
the disparate perceptions of a single object that we have by means of various sense organs
into a single, unified sense-perception of the object: our integrated perception of the man
speaking.

Moreover, this common sense judges not only the perceptions that we receive by means of
the sense organs in the way just explained, but also judges the senses themselves. As St
Thomas remarks, a man sees that he sees, but this cannot be due to the eye: the sense organ
receives only the sense impression of the object, by which sense impression the organ is
modified. The common sense, however, both receives the sense impression of the object and
judges the sense itself. It therefore both sees the object and sees the seeing, and that is how a
man sees that he sees.[6] This seems to be St Thomas’ approach to the modern concept of
‘consciousness’, for is not our experience of consciousness the perception we have of
perceiving? Later, St Thomas will make a similar comment concerning the reflexive act of the
intellect by which we know that we know, and it might be remarked that consciousness is
also the knowledge we have of knowing. Perceiving and knowing are sharply distinguished in
St Thomas.

The fantasy, or imagination, has nothing to do with what today we consider fantasy. It is a
technical term in Aristotelian and Thomist psychology that has to do with the retention by
the soul of a perception of an object of sense. For the object itself does not enter the soul. The
external sense organ is modified and the common sense receives a sense-perception. That
sense impression is then retained in the fantasy or imagination. For, St Thomas remarks, an
animal can be set in motion to seek what is not present, but this would not be possible if the
animal could no longer represent to itself that which was once perceived but no longer
present.[7] This is the function of the fantasy or imagination: it is a storehouse of sense-
perceptions.

When we experience a spontaneous image in our ‘mind’s eye’, that image comes out of this
storehouse. This is the connection of the Thomist concept of fantasy to our modern everyday
sense of the word: the content of our daydream is taken from the storehouse of fantasy in the
Aristotelian and Thomist sense.

It might be remarked that the reader could best understand these powers of the soul that St
Thomas, following Aristotle, delineates, as things the soul can do: it would be fruitless to
look for a location in the soul for each of these powers. However, since the particular
functions of the human soul here being described are on St Thomas’ own account directly
dependent on the body, his analysis of them should be reformable on the basis of findings in
neurophysiology.

The next power is the estimative power. Here it must be recalled that, since St Thomas is
discussing the animal or sensitive soul, he must account for perception not only in man but
also in animals, which on his account lack reason. Moreover, although St Thomas takes for
granted that the animal is attracted to the pleasurable sense impression and repelled by the
disagreeable sense impression,[8] he also wishes to address the cases where the animal
avoids certain things because they are harmful and makes use of certain things because they
are useful. This notion of the useful and the harmful he has taken from St Augustine. St
Thomas is therefore obliged to consider the following sort of case: the lamb, when it sees the
wolf, flees. We are reminded of the experiment of a modern ethologist which established that
newborn chicks immediately fled the shadow of a hawk but not the shadow of a harmless
bird. It is this sort of thing that St Thomas is addressing: how is it that animals which lack
reason have instinctive reactions to immediate sense-perceptions, which reactions neither
are governed by reason nor remain at the level of the ‘stimulus – response’ (pleasure – pain)
model of behavioural psychology? For, St Thomas wants us to understand, it is not that the
lamb is frightened by the size or the greyness of the wolf taken as raw sense data. Rather, St
Thomas says, the lamb sees in the very wolf itself the enemy of its kind. Similarly, in the
modern experiment with the chicks, it was not the mere passing of shadow over the chick
which caused the chick to flee, but the passing of shadow as cast by a (dummy) hawk, as was
indicated by the fact that the passing of shadow as cast by a harmless bird did not cause the
chick to flee.

Moreover, St Thomas is also addressing this sort of thing: how it is that birds build their
nests? For, he says, it is not merely at the level of specific sense-perceptions that are
pleasurable or painful that a bird builds its nest, for the bird does not collect straw for its
nest on account of the pleasure that that activity gives it, but because the straw is useful to
the construction of the nest. As we ourselves remarked in Chapter I, the bird also is able to
judge that its nest is damaged and to repair it, and moreover to build and to repair it
according to the standard model of the nest of the species to which the bird belongs.

As St Thomas himself puts it: ‘It is therefore necessary that the animal perceive meanings
(intentiones) of this kind that the external sense does not perceive.’[9] What St Thomas
means is that the ‘meaning’ that the animal perceives goes beyond the immediate sense-
perception: the fright of the lamb faced with the wolf is not merely a matter of the colour of
the wolf or of its size; it is a matter of a ‘meaning’ that the lamb by instinct possesses or
grasps—that the wolf is its enemy.

However, St Thomas’ notion of this estimative power is quite narrow:

However, the imperfect knowledge of the end is this, that it consists in the sole
apprehension [i.e. perception] of the end, without the nature (ratio) of the end
being known, nor the relation of the act to the end; and this sort of knowledge of
the end is found among the brute animals by their sense-perception and their
natural estimative power.[10]

What St Thomas means is this: The animal really does not understand the end for which it is
acting, nor the relation of its means to its ends. Its actions are instinctual, based both on
sense-perception and on this natural estimative power. This is essential for St Thomas to
assert since according to him only humans possess reason at all—what we can call the
powers of abstraction and ratiocination. However, obviously from common experience in an
age where men even in the cities lived far closer to nature than ordinary men in the
countryside live today, St Thomas wants to account for the purposeful behaviour of animals:
he does not believe that a full account of animal behaviour can be given by a theory of animal
behaviours based merely on pleasure and pain. Hence his assertion that the animal does not
have a rational comprehension of the nature of the end for which it is acting, nor of the
relations of its means and its ends, although it does apprehend the end imperfectly: the bird
collects straw for its nest without apprehending rationally either that the straw is for its nest
or that it is building a nest so that it can raise its brood of chicks; its apprehension is limited
to its sense-perception and to the ‘understanding’ that this estimative power provides.
Does this doctrine accord with St Thomas’ own example of the bird collecting straw for its
nest? For surely there is an instinctual comprehension in the bird of the relation of the
straw-collecting activity (the means) to the nest (the end). Moreover, the bird understands
that the nest is damaged and repairs it according to the standard model of its species. For St
Thomas’ theory to be valid, the estimative power must provide something more than sense-
perception and automatic behaviours, even if it provides less than rational comprehension of
the end and the means to that end.

St Thomas is of course addressing the issue of animal instinct. Indeed, the ‘estimative power’
is sometimes translated the ‘instinctive power’.

It is well to note that St Thomas is addressing instinct within the framework solely of what is
‘harmful’ or ‘useful’ to the animal. We ourselves wonder why St Thomas restricted himself to
that single polarity: surely there are other axes of instinctual judgement both in animals and
in man. St Augustine provided St Thomas with the basic polarity. But St Augustine was not
such a rigid thinker as by that to exclude other possibilities.

The migratory habits of birds are an example of an axis of instinctual judgement that cannot
easily be reduced just to the harmful and to the useful.

Moreover, as we ourselves have often observed, when the swift flying at full power in a
random trajectory in front of the monastery returns to the hole in the monastery wall where
its nest is, it approaches the wall at full power and, without hesitation or confusion, arrives
precisely at the right hole and enters. The swift’s level of spatial comprehension seems to be
very high indeed.

Moreover, as we ourselves have noticed, animals respond to love even when that love is not
exhibited towards them in any obvious way at all that a behavioural psychologist could
adduce as an example of behavioural conditioning. For example, a monk was caring for an
injured dog; certain other animals approached while he was doing so: they responded to his
love, even though that love was not expressed towards them at all.
That this is important for an understanding of the nature of animal intelligence can be seen
in vignettes from the lives of the saints. In one, St Makarios the Alexandrian (4 th C.) was
approached by a hyena who bore with her, her blind pup: she placed the pup at his feet and
waited. By his prayers St Makarios healed the pup of its blindness and restored it to its
mother.

St Savas (439–532) was resting in a lion’s cave in the desert. When the lion returned, it with
great respect and gentleness dragged him out of its lair; and when St Savas insisted on
remaining, the lion gave up and sought out another lair.

When St Gerasimos (5th–6th C.) removed the thorn from the foot of the lion, the lion became
his life-long friend and companion.

But it might also be remarked that the revelations of the ethology of the Twentieth Century
were already old hat in the Thirteenth.

The Thomist concept of the estimative power of the animal might be useful in the evaluation
of research into and experiments concerning animal intelligence. For as we ourselves
understand what St Thomas is saying, the use, say, of a stick by the chimpanzee to obtain the
honey or insects in the tree, or the similar use of primitive tools by other animals, might be
construed to be a matter of this estimative power.

Experiments into the teaching of language to chimpanzees and other higher apes might also
be susceptible of evaluation in the light of St Thomas’ notion: the issue would be the extent
to which the ape that had learned the primitive language was not merely exhibiting this
estimative power—instinctual intelligence—but also an actual capacity for abstract
intelligence. The researchers, as we understand their work, want to say that as primitive as
the language is that they have taught to the ape, it nevertheless exhibits all the necessary
characteristics of human language, including abstract intelligence. However, a critical look at
the evidence would raise the question: is not what is being exhibited this estimative power
and not human intelligence?
German shepherd dogs exhibit a high degree of intelligence which nonetheless must be
considered the sort of thing called the estimative power by St Thomas. Once we ourselves
blocked the road to the monastery to a stray dog, not even a German shepherd, and did not
allow it to pass. The stray, which had already visited the monastery, descended into the gully
below the road and, very clearly exhibiting intelligence—and even St Thomas’ memorative
power, since the dog obviously was intent on proceeding along a road which led only to the
monastery—, searched for a passage around us. But surely this is the estimative power that
St Thomas is discussing.

Moreover, when local wolves pack when it snows—and only when it snows—in order to
attack our mules, they attack the mules as a team, not as a mob. They very clearly have an
articulated instinctual attack strategy. That they pack in this way only when it snows is
suggestive that the whiteness of the snow triggers an instinctual program. Of course, wolves
have since been eliminated on Mount Athos. Our point is that the wolf exhibits an ability to
communicate and to work in concert with its pack-mates in an organized activity which
manifests role differentiation. The language that the chimpanzee is alleged to have learned
might be evaluated in this light: to what extent is the language learned merely a
manifestation of the instinctual power of a social animal, a power that remains at the level of
the estimative power of St Thomas and does not attain to human intelligence?

As we ourselves understand the doctrine of epiphenomenalism, especially as it is

propounded—not by the name of epiphenomenalism, certainly—in Monod’s Le hasard et la
nécessité[11] what is asserted is that human intelligence (the reason or intellect of St
Thomas) is simply a matter of the chance development of the estimative power of the animal
in evolution. That is, the human reason or intellect is a matter of the continual development
in evolution, especially as regards the use of language, of the animal estimative power and
not a matter of a different sort of thing entirely. As we saw above, Fr Copleston remarks that
St Thomas would be committed by his doctrine of the immaterial nature of the human
intellect to rejecting the doctrine of epiphenomenalism. Fr Copleston also appositely
remarks that the doctrine of epiphenomenalism[12] is a matter of an interpretation of the
facts, not a matter of a neutral presentation of the facts themselves, and that the issue is the
adequacy of that interpretation of the facts.
What St Thomas says is that the animal soul has a separate judgemental power—this
estimative power—which enables the animal to evaluate the meanings (intentiones) of
particular sense-perceptions in the way we have discussed. Moreover, these meanings have
to do with whether the thing perceived is harmful or useful to the animal (hence St Thomas’
two examples: the lamb fleeing the wolf; the bird collecting straw for the nest). Since,
according to St Thomas, the animal lacks reason, this estimative power cannot operate on
universals—the general abstract characteristics of objects—because that is a function of
reason. This estimative or instinctive power works on particular or individual sense-
perceptions, discerning a meaning to the particular sense-perception: whether the object
perceived is harmful or useful.

In the case of man, St Thomas somewhat modifies his treatment of the estimative power. For
although he grants that sense-perception in the animal and in man is the same, he asserts
that the estimative power is somewhat different in man: In the animal, the judgement by the
estimative power of the meaning—‘harmful’ or ‘useful’—of a sense-perception is the result of
a natural instinct. In man that judgement is made on the basis of a comparison of ‘meanings
(intentiones)’, but meanings which remain at the level of particular sense-perceptions,
meanings which do not attain to the level of abstract reason.

In man, the estimative power is called by St Thomas the ‘particular judgement’. The reader
may recall from earlier in our presentation that St Thomas remarked that the doctors of his
time assigned the particular judgement to the mid-part of the head. That St Thomas can
accept this point of view indicates clearly that he considers the particular judgement to be a
power of the sensitive or animal soul, that is, a power which does not at all implicate the
reason or intellect, which, according to St Thomas, operates without any reference to the
body at all. St Thomas asserts that in man the particular judgement compares individual
meanings (those related to individual sense-perceptions) whereas the reason has as its task
the comprehension and comparison of universals or concepts.

The difference might be exemplified as follows: the particular judgement, a power of the
sensitive soul that is located in the mid-brain, recognizes that the tiger crouching before me
is a danger, and that not merely on account of its stripes and colour and shape, but on
account of a meaning that I grasp associated with the sense-perception and that arises from a
comparison with other meanings.[13] However, my reason, an intelligible power of the soul
not located in the brain, understands that the animal is a tiger, a member of the cat family,
and that it is different, within the cat family, from the lion, and, outside the cat family, from
the wolf and the other members of the dog family.

The issue in questions of animal intelligence is whether the animal—even the chimpanzee or
gorilla which has been taught an artificial language—ever passes from instinctual meaning—
that the tiger is a danger, that the stick is useful—to abstract intelligence: what sort of thing
the tiger is; what sort of tree it is from which it has taken the stick; and, St Thomas says,
what the nature of the end is and what the relation is of the means to the end.

The final internal sense is the memorative power. St Thomas distinguishes between the
fantasy and the memorative power in the following way: The fantasy retains simple
perceptions of objects of sense, which perceptions have been imprinted from without. The
memorative power contains meanings produced by the estimative power or, in man, the
particular judgement, which meanings arise from within the soul of the animal or man. Since
meanings of the harmful or useful are involved which are not simple sense-perceptions and
which therefore cannot be sense-perceptions stored in the fantasy, the memorative power
must necessarily be different from the fantasy. However, the sense-perceptions that are
recalled by the memorative power are originally stored in the fantasy.

St Thomas observes that in man the memorative power requires an active effort called
‘reminiscence’, whereas in the animal a spontaneous activity brings forth the sense
impression stored in the fantasy. Moreover, St Thomas observes, in the cases both of the
animal and of man, the remembered sense-perception bears the character of a past
occurrence, something impossible for a simple sense-perception to bear by itself, something,
therefore, that cannot be stored in the fantasy.[14]

Here it is well to consider that the powers of the soul that St Thomas is describing are best
understood as arising from his logical analysis of the sorts of things that men and animals
do: it would be fruitless to look for the location of these faculties, although, as we have
already remarked, St Thomas’ analysis of the powers of the sensitive soul should be
reformable on the basis of the findings of neurophysiology.
It should be remarked that the memorative power is what today we would ordinarily
understand by the memory. It is the memorative power that looks to the past, to the pastness
of a thing. St Thomas later posits the existence of a faculty called the ‘memory’, different
from the memorative power. The ‘memory’ is not at all the same thing as the memorative
power. For St Thomas later asserts that the ‘memory’ is the same as the intellect. But the
intellect is the seat of reason and, as we have seen, has no connection with the body at all,
whereas the memorative power, being a function of the sensitive soul, necessarily depends
on the body. St Thomas’ ‘memory’ has certain functions in cognition which have nothing to
do with the pastness of an event.

[1] ST Ia, 78. In what follows ‘soul’ always refers to the human soul, unless otherwise indicated.

[3] ST Ia, 78, 2. These powers, of course, correspond to the Aristotelian vegetative soul or, intuitively, to what we
observe in the higher plants.

[7] This is obvious to anyone who has had a pet dog.

[8] The basis of the ‘conditioning’ of behavioural psychology.

[12] As it is understood by Fr Copleston himself, surely.

[13] Here, St Thomas evidently means that I have had similar experiences with other animals.

Chapter IV -- 8

St Thomas Aquinas then turns to the intellectual powers of the soul, the ones that only man
has among the animals.[1]

St Thomas raises the very important question whether the intellectual power of the soul is a
power of the soul or the very essence of the soul.[2] We have already, in Section 13 of
Chapter III, discussed the connection between mind (nous) and soul (psuche) both in St
Gregory of Nyssa and in Evagrius Pontikos. There we concluded, following St Gregory of
Nyssa, that the mind (nous) was the essence of the soul. This is a Platonic conception. St
Augustine seems to have had much the same view. However, here we see that St Thomas
rejects this view: for St Thomas, the intellect (Latin: intellectus; = Greek: dianoia) is a power
of the soul, not its essence. It should be understood, however, that although St Thomas uses
the word ‘intellect’ here, he means it as a synonym for ‘mind’: it is not as if he is saying that
the intellect is a power of the soul and the mind its essence.

It should be recalled that St Thomas Aquinas, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine have
roughly the same psychology as concerns the three parts of the human soul, what in the
works of St Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius Pontikos we learned to call the mind (nous), the
temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia). Moreover, we learned from Evagrius Pontikos
to call the temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia) taken together, the passionate part of
the soul. St Thomas maintains these distinctions, adding to them, however, the additional
faculties that he has received from Aristotle.

Of course, this tripartite division of the soul in man is ultimately due to Plato, and, most
certainly, St Thomas received it from Plato by way of the Roman Catholic tradition of
anthropology which derives from St Augustine, and then modified it according to his
interpretation of Aristotle.

Aristotle himself maintains the basic outline of the tripartite soul that he himself received
from his master, adding to it, however.

What is in issue, then, is St Thomas’ interpretation of this ultimately Platonic model of the
tripartite soul. For we see that St Thomas is rejecting the Platonic notion that the mind
(nous) is the essence of the soul. Following Aristotle, he makes it a power of the soul.

St Thomas establishes that the intellect, here taken as a whole, is a passive power of the soul.
[3] In regard to the whole intellect, St Thomas means ‘passive’ in the sense that the intellect
is passing from potency (Latin: potentia; = Greek: dunamis) to act (Latin: actus; = Greek:
energeia) in regard to universal being (ens). This is a very difficult part of Thomist
metaphysics, but let us see if we can convey the central idea simply and clearly:
 There is one intellect that is in a state of pure act [let us say, following the
corresponding Greek, pure actualization or pure actuality or pure operation—
that is, pure act without potency or potentiality of any kind] with regard to
universal being (ens): that is the Divine Intellect, which is the essence of God, in
which every being pre-exists originally and virtually, as in its First Cause.[4]

Let us interrupt here.

The reader may recall that St Gregory of Nyssa posited in On the Making of Man that all
concrete, individual men pre-existed in the foreknowledge of God, even though each
concrete, individual man’s soul actually came into being at the instant of his bodily
conception. The same principle is involved here.

Moreover, here there is also involved the concept of the reasons (logoi) of created beings in
the Mind of God. We shall occupy ourselves in Volume II with these reasons (logoi) as they
are understood by Evagrius Pontikos. In the Neoplatonic tradition, these reasons (logoi) are
the essences of created things, which essences exist eternally in the Divine Intellect before
the objects come to be whose essences they are. It should be recalled that in Classical
philosophy what the intellect understands is the essence of the thing, and that that essence is
here being identified with the thing’s reason (logos) in the Mind of God. This concept of the
essences, the reasons (logoi), in the Mind of God, due to the Neoplatonist, Plotinus, and
based ultimately on the forms of Plato, is to be found in St Augustine.

Let us continue with St Thomas where we left off:

For this reason, the Divine Intellect is not in potency but is pure act. However,
no created intellect can have itself in act in respect of the whole of universal
being (ens) [i.e. can, in a single act of knowing, know the whole of universal
being], since it would then be necessary that it be infinite being. Therefore every
created intellect, through the very fact that it is created, is not the act of
[knowing] all the intelligibles, but is constructed in relation to those very
intelligibles, as potency (potentia) proceeding to act (actus).…
 Therefore the angelic intellect is always in act in respect of those intelligibles which are proper to it, on
account of the angel’s closeness to the First [Divine] Intellect, which is pure act…

The human intellect, however, which is lowest in the order of the intellects and the furthest away from
the perfection of the Divine Intellect, is in potency [proceeding to act] in respect of intelligibles…

According to St Thomas, the human intellect is passive in the sense that it is always passing
from a state of potentiality to a state of actualization in regard to its knowledge of intelligible
things, that is, always passing from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. Moreover,
clearly following his own interpretation of St Dionysios the Areopagite, St Thomas places this
assertion into the context of his doctrine of the perfect and infinite being of God in which all
created beings participate in a hierarchy of perfections of being. Here, in particular, he is
placing this doctrine into the context of the hierarchy of created intelligences, of which man
is the lowest, all the angels being higher than man.

For in St Thomas’ system the Divine Intellect is not only the essence of God, but that essence
of God is identical with the being of God, which itself is pure act. Moreover all created beings
receive their being by participation in the being of God, and that in a highly articulated
hierarchy of perfections of being.

First are the highest angels; then the lower angels, illumined by the higher; then man, last
among the created intellects, the least of the created intellects.

But there are not just nine kinds of angels in St Thomas’ system: the nine kinds, due to St
Dionysios the Areopagite, are merely the broadest classes of angels: the actual hierarchy is
much more complex.

This system is important to understand for the sake of St Thomas’ anthropology, for while St
Thomas agrees that man is created in the image of God, in his view, the angels are created
more in the image of God. In St Thomas, there is a different orientation from the
anthropocentric notion that we find for example in St Maximos the Confessor, that man is
the crown of creation who links together both the intelligible and the material creations: St
Thomas posits a very complex mosaic, let us say, of being and places man in an inferior part
of that mosaic as a very small part of it, as the least perfect image of God among the
intellectual beings. It is tempting to see here a reflection of the mediæval community as a
highly stratified society with very rigid class boundaries, in which the individual was a very
small part of a highly defined and articulated whole, quite the opposite of our own modern
culture, which is on the one hand a mass culture and on the other hand an urban culture
centred on the individual taken as a free-moving atom.

However, St Thomas’ notion that man’s ability to intuit the first principles of reason such as
the law of the excluded middle brings man to the border of the angelic world seems a faint
echo of a doctrine of man as a connecting link between the earthly and the spiritual realms—
although, clearly, in St Thomas’ view man is merely a small part of a grand mosaic: St
Thomas is not anthropocentric in the same sense as Greek Fathers such as St Maximos.

Moreover, although St Augustine himself taught a doctrine of the degrees of participation of

created being in God,[5] he is more anthropocentric than St Thomas Aquinas. His
orientation is more similar to that of St Maximos. This might indicate that one reason the
late Classical Age of Rome is both similar to and relevant to our own age is that it was an
urban culture centred on the free-moving individual. That this might be so can be seen in St
Augustine’s emphasis on the psychology of the individual, on the actual experience by the
individual of his own consciousness as the foundation of an experiential proof for the
existence of God: St Augustine has stripped away the whole apparatus of cultural
determinants of belief in order to begin with the individual’s consciousness of thinking. This
accords with a social setting in which the individual is no longer determined by social and
cultural factors, but only by his conscious personal existential choices. This is similar to the
modern urban West. It is very far removed from the world of St Thomas.

To return to St Thomas, we here see very clearly both the central role in St Thomas’ thinking
of the dual notions of potentiality (potentia) and actualization (actus), and the importance of
his notion that God is pure being equal to pure essence equal to pure intellect equal to pure
act and so on. This treatment of God as pure being and so on distinguishes St Thomas from
St Maximos the Confessor, that other interpreter of St Dionysios the Areopagite, and allows
St Thomas to adopt a ‘positivist’ approach to God that is absent in the Greek Patristic
tradition. It allows him to manipulate the concept of ‘being’ in a context of philosophical
metaphysics in such a way as to create a vast system based on being, one that handles all the
issues of philosophy and theology ‘positively’: St Thomas’ system provides you with all the
answers to all the questions you might wish to raise concerning the being and existence both
of God and of his creatures.

[5] This similarity of the doctrines of St Dionysios the Areopagite and St Augustine should be taken to reflect the
Neoplatonic roots of both authors

Chapter IV -- 9

St Thomas next introduces the idea of the ‘agent intellect’.[1] The agent intellect is a difficult
concept. Let us here simply say that it is the power of the human soul to abstract the
universal, or objective concept, from the sense-perception of an object.

St Thomas establishes that the ‘memory’ is part of the intellect.[2] It should be recalled that
this ‘memory’ is not the memorative power that is a part of the sensitive soul, what we would
understand today by ‘memory’. This memory is the power of the intellect to preserve
intelligible species—let us say here, the subjective representations of concepts.[3]

St Thomas asserts that the memory is none other than the intellect itself.[4]

St Thomas asserts that the reason and the intellect are the same thing.[5] This is very
important, for by ‘reason’ St Thomas always means the power of ratiocination: the power of
reasoning by syllogisms or even by the rules of some other system of logic. This is intimately
connected to St Thomas’ doctrine that man in the present life can only know intelligible
realities by means of ratiocination working with propositions based on concepts abstracted
from sense-perceptions, although after death he will have an angel-like intuitive mode of
apprehension of those intelligible realities. We will see below that in making this assertion St
Thomas is most likely addressing the intuitive, Augustinian notion of ‘intellect’.

St Thomas asserts that the ‘superior reason’ and the ‘inferior reason’ are the same power.[6]
He takes the concepts of the superior and inferior reason from St Augustine, and, again
quoting St Augustine, describes the superior reason as that which directs itself to eternal
things, and the inferior reason as that which directs itself to temporal things.
This is very important to understand. St Thomas is making a very important and basic move
in his psychology: he is asserting that any power that a man might have in this life to
apprehend intelligible realities intuitively, and indeed any intellectual power that a man
might have at all, is completely assimilated to man’s reason, which is to be identified strictly
with man’s power of ratiocination.

We find this topic developed in some detail in a passage taken from another work of St
Thomas.[7] This development is very difficult to understand without a complete grounding
in St Thomas’ philosophy, but the basic sense is this: Man’s reason has a capacity to
apprehend intuitively the first principles of reason such as the law of the excluded middle,
the notion that the whole is greater than the part and the law of cause and effect. This
intuitive power to grasp the first principles of reason is the most intuitive power that a man’s
intellect has, one which, in the great hierarchy of intellects that we have just discussed,
brings man to the border of the angelic world, since angels apprehend intelligible realities
exclusively in an intuitive way. This intuitive apprehension by man’s intellect of certain basic
epistemological principles is the full extent of man’s capacity in this life intuitively to
apprehend intelligible realities. For the rest, man must reason by syllogisms using concepts
that he abstracts from the sense-perceptions of material objects.

St Thomas then identifies the ‘intelligence’ with the intellect.[8] ‘Intelligence’ is a concept
that St Thomas takes from St Augustine, although it is not clear just what St Thomas means
by ‘intelligence’ as distinct from the ‘intellect’, even though angels are ‘intelligences’. It is
certain, however, that St Thomas is systematically establishing that all the functions or
powers of the intellect or mind are in fact one: reason.

St Thomas next establishes that the speculative reason (that which attains to general truths)
and the practical reason (that which attains to practical results and works) are the same
power.[9]

Many of the terms that St Thomas has reduced to the reason in the preceding articles are
taken from St Augustine, especially ‘intellect’, the ‘superior reason’, the ‘inferior reason’,
‘intelligence’, and possibly also ‘memory’. What St Thomas is doing is dismissing
Augustinian psychology: to say that he is reinterpreting it would be to suggest that he is
retaining some part of it, which he is not. Augustinian psychology is quite interesting in its
own right, but it would be burdensome to the reader for us to spend much time on it.

However, since it has certain points of contact with the psychology that underlies the
Philokalia, it is worthwhile to delineate its outlines: The mind (mens) is the superior part of
the reasonable soul; it adheres to intelligibles and to God. It contains the reason (ratio) and
the intelligence (intelligentia). Reason (ratio) is the movement of the mind (mens). The most
eminent part of the mens is the intelligence (intelligentia). ‘Intelligence (intelligentia)’ can
be considered synonymous with ‘intellect (intellectus)’.

The intellect (intellectus) is a faculty of the soul, proper to man, which is directly illuminated
by the divine light: ‘Thus in our soul is a certain thing which is called intellect (intellectus).
This very thing which is called intellect (intellectus) and mind (mens) is illuminated by the
superior light. Now that superior light by which the human mind (mens) is illuminated is
God.’[10] The intellect (intellectus) is a faculty superior to the reason, because one can have
reason without having intelligence (intelligentia) or intellect (intellectus), but one cannot
have intelligence without first having reason, and that is so because one attains to
intelligence by means of the reason.[11] In a word, the intelligence is an interior sight,[12] by
which the mind perceives the truth which the divine light uncovers to it.[13]

Note that the final sentence indicates that the ‘intelligence (intelligentia)’ is a faculty of
intuitive apprehension.

It can be seen that the import of St Thomas’ reduction of these Augustinian terms to the
reason, taken always as ratiocination, is to sweep away St Augustine’s psychology. We will
discuss other aspects of St Augustine’s psychology as we proceed.

It should be noted that Fr Copleston has a somewhat broader concept of the Thomist reason
than we have delineated.[14]
[3] We think that St Thomas might also have in mind here the memory that St Augustine discusses; we will see below
why this might be so.

Chapter IV -- 10

St Thomas then turns to questions of the nature of the human conscience.[1] While these are
very important questions for moral theology, let us here simply say that St Thomas
distinguishes two aspects of conscience: one (‘synderesis’) a habit which always inclines
towards the good; the other (‘conscience’), an act by which we judge our own actions on the
basis of our knowledge. The reader may recall from Chapter I that St Macrina had posited
that one of the three powers of the mind (nous) which preserved the image of God in man
was man’s power to discriminate the good from the worse. Here, we see that St Thomas has
avoided calling the conscience in either of its two aspects a power of the human soul, that is,
a power of the intellect. It is not clear to us why he did this. It is clear, however, that he is
consciously limiting the powers of the intellect to one: the reason.

St Thomas then turns to the appetitive powers.[2] Here, St Thomas introduces the parts of
the soul that we have already encountered as the temper (thumos) and desire (epithumia),
and he also discusses the will.

St Thomas distinguishes between the intellectual and the appetitive powers of the soul.[3] In
the terminology of the Cappadocians, the intellectual power of the soul is the mind (nous).

St Thomas distinguishes between the intellectual appetite and the sensitive appetite.[4] In
the terminology of the Cappadocians, the sensitive appetite corresponds to the passionate
part of the soul, the temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia) taken together. We shall
later see that in St Thomas the intellectual appetite is the will.

St Thomas, referring both to St Gregory of Nyssa and to St John of Damascus in support of

his position, divides the sensitive appetite into the irascible appetite and the concupiscible
appetite.[5] This of course corresponds to the temper (thumos) and the desire (epithumia) in
St Gregory of Nyssa, as we have already seen in Chapter II, and also to the same powers in
Evagrius Pontikos, as we have seen in Chapter III and will see, with regard to Evagrius
Pontikos’ ascetical psychology, in Volume II. It is important to grasp that there is a
fundamental point of contact here between the psychology of St Gregory of Nyssa and the
Cappadocians, and the psychology of St Thomas. Of course, as we have already seen, this
division of the soul into the mind (nous), temper (thumos) and desire (epithumia) ultimately
derives from Plato. We will see, however, that St Thomas handles these parts of the soul
somewhat differently than do the sources we have already studied, especially when he deals
with the concept of ‘passion’.

St Thomas establishes that the temper and the desire obey the reason.[6] This doctrine we
saw in Chapter II to be established by St Macrina, and it is clear that it derives both from
Plato and from Aristotle. Of course, it is not certain that all these authors had the same
conception of the reason that St Thomas has.

St Thomas then turns to the will.[7]

St Thomas establishes that the will by natural necessity adheres to its final good, beatitude,
the Beatific Vision.[8] This is a doctrine of St Augustine reinterpreted by St Thomas in
Aristotelian metaphysical categories. It might be remarked here that by comparison with St
Thomas, St Augustine has a much more open and supple system: St Thomas is a logician
dealing with categories of Aristotelian metaphysics, while St Augustine is first and foremost a
psychologist, and one working within the Neoplatonic tradition. What for St Augustine is a
moral injunction—that all men ought to seek after beatitude—has become in St Thomas a
logical statement of the metaphysical structure of the human will.

St Thomas then develops his doctrine of the will.[9] He draws an important analogy between
the operation of the intellect and the operation of the will: The intellect necessarily gives its
assent to those first principles of reason or epistemology—the law of the excluded middle, the
law that the whole is greater than the part, the law of cause and effect and so on—that we
have already mentioned and that the intellect apprehends intuitively: the intellect cannot do
otherwise than assent to these principles. However, when the intellect considers contingent
propositions, whose negation does not necessarily imply the negation of these first
principles, then it does not of necessity give its assent. Notwithstanding, in the case of
propositions whose negation necessarily entails the negation of first principles, then of
necessity the intellect gives its assent to those propositions.
Similarly, the will does not necessarily adhere to goods which have no necessary connection
to beatitude, the Beatific Vision. There are goods which have a necessary connection to
beatitude and which attach man to God, but until the certainty of the experience of the
Beatific Vision demonstrates that necessary connection, the will does not attach itself to God
necessarily, nor to those things which are of God. But in St Thomas, this experience of the
Beatific Vision is attainable only after death. The will of the man who sees God in essence
inheres by necessity in God, just as now by necessity we wish to be blessed, to experience
beatitude, to experience the Beatific Vision.

St Thomas next establishes that the intellect is a higher power than the will.[10] This is a
very important assertion for St Thomas to make for the sake of his development of
psychology. That is, the relation between intellect and will is very important in St Thomas’
psychology, and it is very important for him to establish that the intellect is the highest
power in man in order for him to develop his theory of action the way he wants. St Thomas’
doctrine of the superiority of the intellect over the will was a matter of some dispute among
Scholastics after his death, as was his doctrine of the nature of the will. Recall that St Thomas
has just previously systematically assimilated all the intellectual powers of man to the
reason, which he understands to be the manipulation, by means of Aristotelian syllogistic, of
propositions based on concepts abstracted from sense-perception.

St Thomas then establishes that the will moves the intellect.[11] This is to be understood, St
Thomas makes clear, in the sense that by an act of will we can set about learning
mathematics.

St Thomas establishes, again quoting St Gregory of Nyssa and St John of Damascus, that the
will is to be found in the intellectual part of the soul, whereas the temper and the desire are
to be found in the irrational (that is to say, the passionate) part of the soul.[12] Hence, we
have a division of the soul into intellect, temper and desire, and the will is placed with the
intellect: the temper and the desire have no necessary connection to the will.

St Thomas turns to ‘free decision (liberum arbitrium)’, what we would ourselves approach
today with the notion of ‘freedom of the will’.[13] St Thomas establishes that man has ‘free
decision’.[14] Note that he has already said the man’s will adheres necessarily to beatitude,
the Beatific Vision, but that before the experience of the Beatific Vision, man’s will is not held
necessarily in any one particular good.

St Thomas establishes that free decision is the same thing as the will.[15] In this he is taking
his own final position on a mediæval subject of debate.

We will return to a discussion of the will below, when we turn to St Thomas’ theory of action.

St Thomas then begins his analysis of human cognition.[16] He establishes that the soul can
know material objects by means of the intellect. He will now proceed to delineate how, in his
own system, the intellect knows a material object.

St Thomas rejects the notion that the soul knows all things by means of ‘species’ which are
naturally innate to it.[17] In this regard he quotes Aristotle to the effect that when a man is
born, his intellect is a tabula rasa—a blank tablet. If a man had innate ‘species’, or innate
ideas, then his mind would not be a tabula rasa. As we have already remarked, this would
exclude the notion of the collective unconscious of C. G. Jung if that were taken to be a
separate set of innate ideas or archetypes within each individual man.

In an interesting development for bioethics, St Thomas remarks that since the intellect does
not use any bodily organ in its operation, it is not impeded in its functioning by a lesion to
any bodily organ.[18] Hence, according to the letter of a Thomist analysis, brain death
cannot be a valid model for the death of a man: the higher part of the human soul, the
intellect, not being dependent on any bodily organ, cannot be damaged in its functioning by
damage to any bodily organ, even the brain. For, St Thomas says, the powers of the human
soul which are exercised by the use of a bodily organ are the senses, the imagination, and, in
general, all the powers of the sensitive part of the soul. He then remarks that for a person to
acquire new knowledge, or even to use old knowledge, it is necessary for the soul to use the
imagination and the other powers of the sensitive soul, those which depend on the body for
their operation. For, he says, when the use of the imagination is prevented by a lesion to a
bodily organ, as in ‘frenzy’, or, similarly, when the use of the memorative power is prevented,
as in ‘lethargy’, then a man is prevented from exercising his understanding, even in those
things in which he has already acquired the relevant knowledge. We ourselves have seen this
in the case of a certain person suffering from damage to the brain: his spiritual condition
remains what it was before the damage, but he is prevented from exercising his faculties by
the damage to the organ.

St Thomas closes his analysis with an important remark:

However, if the proper object of our intellect were the separated form [such as
the angel], or if the form of sensible things did not subsist in particular material
objects, as the Platonists say, it would not be necessary that, in order to
understand, our intellect should have constant recourse to phantasms [that is,
sense-perceptions of objects or the recollections of such sense-perceptions].[19]

But the Philokalia is based on the proposition that it is possible for the human intellect to
attain to such intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities without the aid of phantasms.
Indeed, the method taught by the Philokalia is a method of divesting oneself of phantasms so
as to attain to such intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities.

St Thomas, quoting St Augustine, accepts the doctrine that the soul knows all things in the
eternal reasons that exist in the Divine mind, but under St Thomas’ interpretation, this
means that the human mind participates in a certain fashion in the divine light, not that it
actually apprehends, before death and the Beatific Vision, those eternal reasons that are in
the Mind of God.[20] It is important for us to spend some time on St Augustine’s notion.

Let us begin with the eternal reasons in the Mind of God. These are the essences of things,
what the thing was intended by God from all eternity to be. These of course are the Platonic
forms or Ideas transposed into the Mind of God. As Gilson writes:

Since they subsist in the intelligence (intelligence) of God, the Ideas [= eternal reasons] necessarily
participate in his essential attributes. Like him, they are eternal, immutable and necessary. They are
indeed not formed creatures, but, on the contrary the forms of all the rest. For them, therefore, there is

not at all birth and end, but they are on the contrary the causes of all that which is born and ends.… [21]
Now the first important relation is that between the body of man and these Ideas. We learn
from Gilson that the soul is an intermediary between the body extended in space and
incapable of apprehending the divine Ideas, and the divine Ideas themselves, to which the
soul is closely related since the soul is a spiritual nature. The soul takes from the divine Ideas
and confers on the body the fact of being what it is: if the body did not participate in the
divine Ideas, it would not be what it is; but if it participated in them as immediately as the
soul did, it would be soul. It is by means of the soul that the body participates in the supreme
Life, which is at the same time a wisdom and an immutable truth.[22]

The next thing we must understand is St Augustine’s theory of knowledge: the mind, the eye
of the soul, sees intelligibly by means of the divine light that God shines on intelligible
things, just in the way that a man sees physically by means of the physical light that the sun
shines on material things. It would be fruitless to depart from this metaphor in attempting to
understand the nature of the divine illumination.

Now, concerning the rational part of the soul that is illumined by this divine light, we learn
from Gilson that the intellectual mind (mens intellectualis), a thing distinct from the
illumination that comes from God to enable the soul to see intelligible truths, is ‘sometimes
[given by Augustine] the technical name of intelligentia or of intellect, and he even expressly
specifies that this intellect is a creature distinct from God, since God creates it, and the
contingent is distinguished from the uncreated and from the immutable’.[23]

Concerning the operation on the mind of the divine illumination, Gilson writes:

How is this divine illumination exercised on the mind (pensée)? It is here that the true difficulties
commence, and one cannot extricate himself from them except by distinguishing two cases: that in
which we know created objects by the divine light, without seeing that light itself, which is the normal
case; and that in which we see this light itself, which is the case of mystical experience. In the first case,
the principal character of the light is to be immediate, that is to say, that it be exercised on the mind
(pensée) without passing through any intermediary. It is thus that God presides over the human mind
(pensée), something that Augustine again expresses when he recalls that if the soul is not God,

nonetheless, there is nothing in creation which is closer to God than the soul. [24]

Note in the last part of the quotation t

he anthropocentric orientation of St Augustine, similar to what we have already remarked in
St Maximos the Confessor.

Next, note that the possibility of mystical experience is held open.

Finally, this apprehension by the mind (pensée), given the immediacy of the operation of the
divine light on it, is to be understood as intuitive. For, as Gilson has already remarked, in St
Augustine the intelligence is an interior sight by which the mind apprehends the truth which
the divine light uncovers to it. There is nothing in what St Augustine is saying that could be
construed to be ratiocination. However, we will see just below that Gilson would want us to
understand that in the normal everyday case, this intuitive apprehension is not to be
considered a mystical apprehension of the eternal reasons or of the divine light.

Gilson continues:

On the other hand, that to which the soul is immediately submitted in God is
certain ‘intelligible realities’, res intelligibiles, which are none other than the
divine Ideas themselves. St Augustine designates them by different names, such
as ideae, formae, species, rationes or regulae. In every way, these Ideas are the
archetypes of every species or of every individual created by God; in fact,
everything has been created according to a certain model, and the type to which
man belongs is obviously not the same as the type to which the horse belongs;
every thing has therefore been created according to its proper model and, since
everything has been created by God, these models of things, or Ideas, could not
exist otherwise than in the mind (pensée) of God. If, therefore, one brings
together these two complementary conclusions, one obtains this third
conclusion: in its operations, the human intellect is immediately submitted to
the Ideas of God.

What Gilson is saying here is that the immediate effect on the mind of the divine
illumination is that the mind is ‘submitted’ to the eternal reasons or Ideas in the Mind of
God. Now Gilson goes on to discuss the question of how the mind is submitted to the eternal
reasons in the Mind of God, how it experiences them:
 A first interpretation of the Augustinian response would consist of saying that, for the human mind
(pensée), to be submitted to the divine Ideas is nothing else than to see them. The texts to support this
thesis are not lacking. St Augustine sometimes speaks of a vision by the mind (pensée) of the divine

Ideas: ‘They can be seen (intueri) by his interior and intelligible eye.’ [25] He specifies that we see the
truth not only by God but in him, which amounts to saying that it is in the very divine truth that we see
the truth and that it is the view of this divine truth that permits us in turn to conceive truths in our very
selves. The question is therefore to know if St Augustine in reality accords us a direct view of the Ideas of
God and of the knowledge in God of things that necessarily would result from this vision. If the question
is posed in this way, it must be replied that in the order of normal knowledge, not mystical, there is for

us neither an intuition of the eternal reasons nor a sight of the very light of God. [26]

Note that the meaning of the last sentence is that the immediate apprehension of the created
object in the light of God, which we have taken to be intuitive in the philosophical sense, is in
the normal case not to be identified with an intuition of the eternal reasons themselves nor
with an intuition of the very light of God. These things are matters of higher mystical
experience.

Before we continue it is well to make some remarks. St Thomas Aquinas is dismissing all of
this.[27] When he says that we see things in the eternal reasons in the sense that the mind
participates in a certain fashion in the divine light, he has in view a completely different
psychology and a completely different theory of knowledge. He means that the human mind,
by the very fact of its existing, in some fashion participates in the divine light, and so has its
own natural, created light by which it illuminates what it sees. There is no room in St
Thomas Aquinas’ theory of cognition for the divine illumination that St Augustine teaches.
Moreover, because of his doctrine of the abstraction of the concept from the data of sense-
perception by means of the soul’s own natural created light, St Thomas cannot accept that
the eternal reasons play a role in ordinary human cognition. However, St Thomas does not
want to dismiss completely the existence of these eternal reasons in the Mind of God. Hence
his statement that we can see them only after death in the Beatific Vision.

Next, it is well to realize that although both St Augustine and Evagrius Pontikos have a
doctrine of the reasons (Latin: rationes; Greek: logoi) of created things, St Augustine places
them in the Mind of God, whereas Evagrius does not, at least not in the same way. Evagrius
identifies the reasons (logoi) with the wisdom of God, different from God’s nature, a wisdom
that is embedded in creation the way the art of the artist is embedded in his work. He places
these reasons (logoi) at the metaphysical level that St Augustine places ‘number’: as the
principle of the divine ordering and articulation of the material creation. The result is that
while both St Augustine and Evagrius assert that the mystic or contemplative can
contemplate the reasons of created things, for St Augustine this is a very high contemplation,
whereas for Evagrius, it is the beginning of contemplation: second natural contemplation, a
contemplation of the imperfect mind (nous).

Moreover, there is no developed doctrine in Evagrius of the illumination by the divine light
as part of the process of cognition or even as a precondition for the intuitive apprehension of
the reasons (logoi) during the course of second natural contemplation. He does make a
passing reference in the Kephalaia Gnostica I, 35 to such illumination, but any use he might
make of the notion is merely implicit. Evagrius approaches the matter somewhat differently
from St Augustine. On this matter, Evagrius’ theory of cognition is somewhat closer to that of
St Thomas, as we shall discuss further on. Moreover, Evagrius emphasizes the role of the
Holy Spirit in contemplation only in the higher stages of natural contemplation, in first
natural contemplation, the contemplation of angels.

Gilson remarks: ‘To see the ideas of God would be to see God…’[28] Evagrius Pontikos has a
different point of view. He does not inject the reasons (logoi) into the Mind of God in the
same way that St Augustine does, so he is free to separate the contemplative vision of the
reasons (logoi) of created objects in second natural contemplation from the contemplative
vision of God himself in Theology.

Gilson also remarks: ‘To see things in the ideas of God would again be to know them without
having need of looking at them.’[29] Following St Isaac the Syrian’s interpretation of
Evagrius Pontikos on the role of the senses in contemplation,[30] we understand that in
Evagrius the contemplation of the reason (logoi) requires the sensible presence of the object
whose reason (logos) is to be contemplated. This seems to be due to the placement by
Evagrius of the reasons (logoi) in the wisdom of God, which in our view is to be taken in
Evagrius as the ‘essential form’ of creation similar to the ‘number’ by which God orders
creation in St Augustine rather than as the Mind of God, or even, God forbid, as a fourth
person of the Holy Trinity. That is, in Evagrius one does not apprehend the reasons (logoi) in
the Mind of God but in creation itself: just as he himself says in the Kephalaia Gnostica, we
perceive the art of the architect in his work of art. But in Evagrius, despite this placement of
the reasons (logoi), the contemplation of these reasons (logoi) in second natural
contemplation is what Gilson would call a mystical apprehension: given the severe ascesis
that Evagrius himself presupposes for this contemplation, it cannot be a matter of the course
of ordinary human cognition. The differences on this matter between St Augustine and
Evagrius Pontikos are due to their different applications of Platonic concepts in their
treatments of the reasons (Latin: rationes; Greek: logoi) of created things.

To return to the Summa, the basis of St Thomas’ own approach is this: according to St
Thomas, intellectual knowledge comes only from the senses.[31]

St Thomas continues in the same vein: the intellect cannot know in act by means of the
intelligible species that it has in its power, not applying itself to the phantasms, which are the
sense-perceptions of objects or recollections of those sense-perceptions.[32] We will discuss
St Thomas’ theory of cognition in more detail below. Let it suffice here that what he means is
that, in reasoning about the concepts that it has in its power, the intellect must have recourse
to recollections of the sense-perceptions of the objects from which the concepts were
abstracted: no man is capable of reasoning purely abstractly.

St Thomas establishes that the intellect is prevented from operating by the impediments
which fall upon the senses.[33] St Thomas here seems to mean that since the reason operates
on the data of the senses, it is prevented from operating by impediments to the functioning
of those senses.

[13] ST Ia, 83. In rendering liberum arbitrium by ‘free decision’, we have been influenced by J. B. Korolec’s article,
‘Free Will and free choice’ in the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy—see Medieval p. 630.

[30] Isaac p. 23, fn. 29—see the discussion of this interpretation in Section 5 of Chapter III, above, under the
discussion of Kephalaia Gnostica III, 8.

Chapter IV -- 11

St Thomas now turns to how the intellect operates.[1]

St Thomas establishes that our intellect operates by abstracting from the images or
phantasms produced in sense-perception.[2]

St Thomas makes this important distinction: we perceive not the ‘sensible species’ but the
sensible object by means of the ‘sensible species’, and we know not the ‘intelligible species’
but by means of the ‘intelligible species’.[3] In the case of the sensible species, the ‘species’ is
the sense-perception of the sensible object; in the case of the intelligible species, the ‘species’
is the intelligible form or ‘image’ of the universal, or objective concept. As St Thomas writes:

Whence, the similitude of the visible thing is that according to which the sight
sees; and the similitude of the thing known, which is the intelligible species
(species), is the form according to which the intellect knows (intelligit). But
since the intellect is turned back on itself, according to this very reflexive action
it knows both its simple act of knowing[4] and the species (species) that it knows
(intelligit). And thus the species (species) is secondarily that which is known;
but that which primarily is known is the thing of which the intelligible species is
the similitude. And this is shown even from the opinion of the ancients, who
posited that ‘Like is known by like.’ For they posited that the soul by means of
the earth which was in it knew the earth which was outside it, and thus
concerning other things. If therefore we accept the species (species) of the earth,
in place of the earth, according to the doctrine of Aristotle which says, ‘The stone
is not in the soul but the species (species) of the stone,’ it follows that the soul
knows (cognoscit) by means of the intelligible species (species intelligibiles) the
things which are outside the soul.[5]

This ‘species’ of St Thomas is similar to the ‘mental representation (noema)’ that Evagrius
Pontikos discusses in the works that we will study in Volume II. Therefore let us spend some
time on this matter.

Gilson has a detailed analysis of the stages of perception and intellection that is largely a
digest of quotations and paraphrases of passages from various works of St Thomas, to which
the reader is referred for a detailed analysis.[6] We will simply point out the most important
aspects of St Thomas’ doctrine. It should be remarked that this is a very difficult field and
that each interpreter of St Thomas has his own opinion what St Thomas really means.
The problem that is being addressed is how we know an object. In the case of the sense-
perception of a sensible object, the problem is this: surely the object itself does not enter our
mind. Nor, nowadays, do we want to say that the soul knows carbon because of the carbon
that is in the soul itself. The sense organ is modified—usually, as here, sight is taken to be the
sense in question, so we should assume the eye. This is the primary sense-perception: a
modification of the cells in the retina of the eye. This primary sense-perception is of a
particular object, not of a concept: we see a certain man, Tom, not ‘man’ taken to be a
concept of man; and it is a similitude of Tom that impresses itself upon the cells in the retina
of our eye, not Tom himself and not the concept of ‘man’. This primary visual perception of
Tom is integrated by the common sense with the other primary sense-perceptions of Tom,
received by means of the other sense organs, into an integrated sense-perception of ‘Tom’.
The ‘phantasm’—this is simply the perceptual image—of the specific man, Tom, is the result.
This is what is stored in the fantasy.

This ‘phantasm’ is the sensible species to which St Thomas is referring.

What St Thomas is saying is that in the case of a sensible object, what we perceive is the
sensible object itself, by means of the similitude which we receive into our eye in the way just
described, which similitude is integrated into a sensible species or phantasm by the common
sense. This sensible species or phantasm is concrete. There is no question at this level, which
is the level of the sensitive soul which depends intrinsically on the body, of a cognition of a
universal, or objective concept, ‘man’. We merely have a sense-perception of ‘Tom’, a specific
man. We are here at the level of concrete sense-perceptions. It is at this level that sense-
perceptions are stored in the fantasy, at this level that the particular judgement or estimative
power works in man and in animals, at this level that the memorative power works in man
and in animals.

This notion of St Thomas of the sensible species or phantasm as a concrete sense-perception

is exactly equivalent to Evagrius Pontikos’ concept of the ‘mental representation (noema)’ as
applied to the perception of an object of sense, and the one concept can be taken to explain
the other. The only difference is that Evagrius Pontikos has a simpler model of sense-
perception without all the stages and faculties that St Thomas following Aristotle posits:
there is no common sense in Evagrius, at least not in any obvious way, and apart from a few
remarks in the Kephalaia Gnostica,[7] Evagrius does not discuss in the detail of St Thomas
the actual mechanism of sense-perception.

The next stage is the stage of intellection, of grasping the universal, or objective concept,
‘man’ that is instantiated by ‘Tom’, the particular man standing in front of me and whom I
see. Here, St Thomas’ doctrine is difficult to grasp.

At the stage of intellection, the problem for St Thomas is to identify just what is known by
the mind and how. As we have seen, he is adamant that what naturally can be known by the
mind in this life after the Fall of Adam depends strictly on sense-perception. Hence only
those intelligible things that relate to objects of sense can, in St Thomas’ view, naturally be
known by man in this life, apart from such principles as the law of the excluded middle and
the law of cause and effect, which by intuition are known by the mind directly. The rest of the
things that a man knows, he knows by reason—ratiocination on the model of Aristotelian
syllogistic, even practical syllogistic—operating on concepts that the man has abstracted
from the sense-perceptions of objects.

But, St Thomas wants to say, those intelligible things that we can know on the basis of sense-
perception are not the sensible species or perceptual similitudes or phantasms of objects that
we receive when we perceive an object of sense and that constitute the data of sense-
perception as integrated by the common sense. Something more is involved than sense-
perception. For knowledge is of universals or concepts, of the abstract properties of sensible
objects, which abstract properties constitute the essences of the sensible objects.

These abstract properties are neither conventional (as when we say that ‘man’ is a concept
defined by social convention) nor subjective (as when we say that ‘man’ is a subjective idea
that depends on each person’s individual judgement), but objectively real (the concept ‘man’
is an objective fact), although not existing independently of the objects themselves (there is
no autonomous Platonic form ‘man’ separate from individual men such as ‘Tom’). Moreover,
St Thomas has asserted, man does not have innate species or ideas; hence, the abstract
properties cannot arise from within him. Moreover, these abstract properties are not
concrete sense-perceptions. Moreover, these abstract properties are cognized by the
distinctly human part of the soul, the mind or intellect, which is at all not dependent on the
body but which uses the data of sense-perception—the sensible species or phantasms of
which we have just described the formation—as the basis for the intellection of these
properties. This complex of conditions creates a demand on St Thomas’ theory of cognition:
how the intellect knows the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’ that is instantiated by
‘Tom’, of whom the mind has only a concrete sense-perception or phantasm.

St Thomas solves his problem by asserting that the intellect knows universals or concepts but
only on the basis of their abstraction from sense-perception. The intellect knows the
universal, or objective concept—in St Thomas knowing is completely different from
perceiving—by means of intelligible species which it abstracts from the sense-perception.
This intelligible species is analogous to the sensible species by which in primary sense-
perception an object of sense is perceived. St Thomas’ analogy is very important for an
understanding of what he means.

When we perceive Tom, Tom himself does not enter our eye and our mind: the sensible
species of Tom—the sense-perception of Tom, the phantasm of Tom—enters our mind. This
is a similitude of Tom, not Tom himself. Similarly, when the intellect cognizes—understands
—the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’, it does not receive the universal, or objective
concept, ‘man’ into itself. What the intellect does receive into itself is the intelligible species
of the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’: an abstract image of the universal, or objective
concept, ‘man’. Hence, in St Thomas, the intelligible species by which we know the universal,
or objective concept, is defined on an analogy with the visual similitude that we in sense-
perception have of an object of sense.

This intelligible species is similar to our modern notion of a concept. For St Thomas means
by ‘intelligible species’ the subjective concept that I have in my mind by which I know the
universal, or objective concept, which is common to Tom, Dick and Harry: the quality of
being a man.

We have already addressed the formation of the sense-perception. The problem now is the
process of abstraction: how the human passes from the concrete sense-perception to the
subjective concept—from the concrete sense-perception of Tom to the intelligible species, or
subjective concept, of the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’.
We have a concrete sense-perception of Tom: this is the phantasm. Now, St Thomas says,
our active intellect shines as a light on that phantasm of Tom and actively abstracts the
universal, or objective concept, ‘man’ from the phantasm. However, in actuality the active
intellect abstracts the intelligible species ‘man’ from the concrete sense-perception or
phantasm of Tom. This intelligible species ‘man’ is the subjective concept that is the
intelligible similitude or abstract image of the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’
instantiated by Tom. The intellect then places that intelligible species ‘man’ into our ‘possible
intellect’. The active intellect and the possible intellect can be construed simply to be two
functions of the human intellect logically required by St Thomas’ analysis of the act of
knowing a thing. That is, in order for us to understand St Thomas without being distracted
by mysterious faculties of the human intellect such as the active intellect and the possible
intellect, let us simply consider these faculties to be things that the human intellect does: the
intellect of man shines an intellectual light on the concrete sense-perception of Tom,
abstracts the subjective concept ‘man’ that is an abstract image of the objective concept ‘man’
and then retains that subjective concept.

When we stated above that the mind received the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’ by
means the intelligible species, we meant that the active intellect illumined the phantasm of
Tom and then actively abstracted the intelligible species ‘man’ related to the universal, or
objective concept, ‘man’ from that phantasm of Tom, and then retained that intelligible
species, ‘man’.

It should be understood that the light that the active intellect shines on the phantasm of Tom
is a natural, created light. It is precisely the light of the human mind that, when he was
dismissing St Augustine’s psychology, St Thomas stated to be a participation in the divine
light.[8] However, this participation by no means makes the natural, created light of the
mind to be any more than similar to the light of God.

It should be remarked that Fr Copleston has a somewhat more refined analysis of the
relation of the active to the possible intellect in the process of abstraction:

The active intellect then abstracts the universal element by itself, producing in
the passive [= possible] intellect the species impressa. The reaction of the
 passive intellect to the determination by the active intellect is the verbum
mentis (species expressa), the [subjective] universal concept in the full sense.[9]

The Thomist understanding of the intelligible species is very similar to Evagrius Pontikos’
doctrine of the mental representation (noema) related to an intelligible reality. In both cases
there is an explicit analogy with the act of visual perception. In both cases, there is an
objective character to the intelligible species or mental representation (noema) related to the
intelligible reality. The difference, of course, is that on the basis of his Aristotelian realism St
Thomas explicitly limits himself to the universal, or objective concept, as instantiated in
concrete objects of sense, whereas Evagrius goes on, following a more Platonic metaphysics,
to develop a doctrine of mental representations (noemata) related to intelligible realities that
are not necessarily instantiated in objects of sense. Hence, in Evagrius there is no doctrine of
the abstraction of the mental representation of an intelligible from the sense impression of
an object. It would be a misreading of Evagrius to consider that this is what he has in mind in
second natural contemplation when he indicates that the sensible object must be present for
the (imperfect) mind to be able to cognize the intelligible reason (logos) of the sensible
object. In Evagrius, the mental representation of the reason (logos) of the object is cognized
intuitively with a spiritual faculty of the mind, one that St Thomas Aquinas does not
recognize to exist. This spiritual faculty of the mind is similar to the ‘intelligentia’ of St
Augustine. Moreover, in Evagrius, in contemplation, the mental representation (noema) of
the intelligible reality alters (‘imprints’) the mind (nous) so as to transmit gnosis, intuitive
spiritual knowledge, to it.[10]

According to Gilson, St Augustine has a concept of the ‘notion (notio)’ which is imprinted on
the mind by the eternal reasons which exist in the Mind of God.[11] While according to
Gilson’s interpretation, the content of the ‘notion (notio)’ is not a concept, it seems to us to
be very close to Evagrius’ idea of the mental representation (noema) of an intelligible reality.
For according to Gilson, who quotes St Augustine, the notion (notio) of ‘beatitude’ impressed
on the mind is that according to which we say of ourselves that we desire beatitude.
Psychologically, this seems possible only if the notion (notio) of beatitude in some sense
gives us an intelligible foretaste of beatitude, which would be the same as the Evagrian
notion of the mental representation (noema) of an intelligible reality which imprints the
mind, especially in contemplation. St Augustine’s very verb, ‘impressed’, corresponds to
Evagrius’ ‘imprint (tupono)’. According to Gilson,[12] concerning the impressing by the
divine ideas on the mind, St Augustine uses the same image of the seal in the wax that
Evagrius Pontikos uses for the mental representation (noema). These parallels make us
wonder if there is a common source. However, Evagrius has no doctrine of the dual role of
the reasons (logoi) in natural, common perception or cognition, and in mystical cognition,
only a doctrine of the role of the reasons (logoi) in mystical cognition, that is to say, in
contemplation.[13]

To return to St Thomas, St Thomas now goes on, with remarkable introspective insight, to
comment that our intellect can turn back on itself in a reflexive act of cognition. By means of
this reflexive act, the intellect knows both its own simple act of knowing and the intelligible
species that it knows. Thus, in the first instance, by means of the intelligible species of the
universal, or objective concept, ‘man’, the intellect knows the universal, or objective concept,
‘man’ that is instantiated by Tom, Dick or Harry. In the second instance, by a reflexive act of
cognition the intellect knows both that it knows and the actual intelligible species, or
subjective concept, ‘man’ that relates to the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’. However,
St Thomas says, what is known primarily is the ‘thing of which the intelligible species is the
similitude’ and what is known secondarily is the intelligible species, ‘man’. Here, there is a
problem of interpretation. This ‘thing of which the intelligible species is the similitude’: is
this the concrete object, ‘Tom’ or is it the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’ instantiated
by Tom? We think that the evidence is that it is the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’. For
knowledge is of universals. We do not think that it would make sense to say that what is
known primarily is Tom, Dick or Harry taken as an individual, since what is in issue here is
not sense-perception, which certainly is of Tom, Dick or Harry and not of the universal, but
intellectual knowledge, which is of universals or concepts or propositions.[14] It is well to
recall that in St Thomas’ system the concept ‘man’ is neither conventional nor subjective, but
objective, although there is no Platonic form ‘man’ existing apart from individual men: Tom
is a man, not conventionally, not subjectively, but because that is the structure of reality.

It is worth remarking on Aristotle’s own view. According to On the Soul,[15] in the reflexive
act of cognition, the mind (nous) is able to cognize ‘itself’. This seems rather more
substantial than a mere cognition of the act itself of cognition. Aristotle continues with a
difficult but interesting discussion of the knowability of the mind (nous) by the mind (nous)
itself.[16] However, we learn from Fr Copleston that St Thomas rejected the notion that the
soul could have an immediate intuitive cognition of itself.[17]
St Thomas then establishes that we can cognize, or actively understand, only one thing at a
time, whereas we can know many things simultaneously.[18] This is important, for it agrees
with Evagrius Pontikos’ assessment in Chapter 24 of On the Thoughts.[19]

St Thomas establishes that the intellect knows the universal directly, and the particular
object only indirectly.[20] That is, the intellect knows the universal, or objective concept,
‘man’ directly and Tom only indirectly. This is very important for our understanding of St
Thomas’ doctrine of the nature of human knowledge. St Thomas says this:

Our intellect is not able directly and primarily to know the particular in material things. The reason for
this is that the principle of particularity in material things is the individual matter; however, as has been

said above,[21] our intellect cognizes (intelligit) by abstracting the intelligible species from matter of
this sort. What is abstracted from individual matter, however, is the universal [‘man’]. Whence, our
intellect directly cognizes only universals. Indirectly, however, and after a fashion, by a certain reflexive

movement (reflexionem) it can cognize the particular [‘Tom’]. As has been said above, [22] even after it
has abstracted the intelligible species [‘man’, ‘horse’, etc.], the intellect is not able to cognize in act
according to them, unless it turns itself to the phantasms [sense-perceptions or recollections of sense-
perceptions of ‘Tom’, ‘Black Beauty’, etc.], in which it knows the intelligible species [‘man’, ‘horse’, etc.],
as is said in III De Anima [by Aristotle]. Therefore, the intellect thus directly cognizes the universal itself
[‘man’] by means of the intelligible species [‘man’]. Indirectly, however, it cognizes the particulars
[‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’] of which are the phantasms. And in this way it forms the proposition:

‘Socrates is a man’.[23]

In reading this article it is well to recall that the province of the intellect is knowledge, not
sense-perception.

We see here that the intellect directly knows the universal, or objective concept, ‘man’ by
means of the intelligible species ‘man’ that it abstracts from the phantasm of the concrete
object, Tom. The intellect only secondarily, by a reflexive act, knows Tom himself.

Moreover, St Thomas says in the last part of the body of the article, when a person wishes to
think about the concept ‘man’, which he has already abstracted from concrete sense-
perceptions of Tom, Dick or Harry and retained, he must nonetheless return to recollections
of sense-perceptions—phantasms—of concrete men whom he has once perceived: Tom, Dick
or Harry. What St Thomas means is that we cannot reason absolutely abstractly; we must
have recourse to the phantasms by which we came to know the abstract concepts about
which we are reasoning. As St Thomas himself says, arguments are elucidated by examples.
This is true, curiously enough, even in pure mathematics.

Summarizing, St Thomas then repeats that the intellect directly knows the universal, or
objective concept, ‘man’ and indirectly the particular, or concrete object, ‘Tom’. Moreover, St
Thomas says, this is how the intellect comes to form the proposition: ‘Tom is a man.’

For St Thomas, knowledge in this life is propositional. The knowledge that the intellect has is
the proposition ‘Tom is a man.’ Mystical or intuitive knowledge can only come about
supernaturally. In the Thomist system there is a very sharp disjunction between natural
human knowledge, which is a rational knowledge based on the manipulation of propositions
based on concepts in the way just described, and supernatural mystical knowledge. In the
doctrine of the Philokalia, and even in St Augustine, there is no such sharp disjunction: man
retains the natural capacity intuitively to cognize intelligible realities both in mystical
experience and in ordinary experience. Of course, neither St Augustine nor the Philokalia
deny the necessity of grace in mystical experience.

The Thomist doctrine of the abstraction of the concept from the data of sense-perception had
its effect on the interpretation of St Augustine’s own doctrine. For recall that in St
Augustine’s theory of cognition the divine light illuminates the intellect or intelligence, which
is higher than the reason. But a question arises that Gilson discusses as follows:

It follows from that, that St Augustine deliberately removes from the divine illumination all knowledge
that our intellect (intellect) might abstract from the sensible, and even that he denies that our intellect
(intellect) might be able to have the sensible for object; only the reason (raison) deals with the sensible;
as for the intellect (intellect), uniquely occupied with the intelligible order, it has nothing to abstract
from material things and the divine light that it receives is not given to it for that purpose. But if the
illumination does not abstract [in the Aristotelian or Thomist sense just discussed by us above] what
does it do?

One can say without any exaggeration that this question has exercised the sagacity of many generations
of historians. The most apparent datum of the problem is the absence of data. Augustine himself tells us
neither how the intellect operates nor what it does. Certain persons simply observe this serious lacuna.
Others, although admitting that St Augustine has said nothing of the sort, force themselves to fill the gap
by lending to Augustinian thought an abstractive activity…; why, indeed, would it not be legitimate to
 complete his doctrine on this important point by introducing that which it lacks in a gap predestined to
receive it? Notwithstanding, it seems to us that there might be a hypothesis more simple to envisage,
which is that on this point there is no lacuna in the system of St Augustine, it being understood that one
looks at it from his own point of view and that one does not argue in the name of principles which he
never himself accepted. In reality, in Augustine there is no problem of the Umsetzung [application] of
the sensible to the intelligible; if he did not resolve it, it is because he did not have to pose it, and to wish
that he had resolved it is not to fill a lacuna in his doctrine but to transform that doctrine into another…

[24]

To continue, we remarked that post-mediæval modern philosophy is largely a reaction

against mediæval philosophy. One place where this is very true is in the rejection by and
large by modern philosophy of the notion of the fixed essence of a thing. This essence of a
thing is the universal, or objective concept, instantiated by the individual object, in the
example that we have been using, ‘man’ instantiated by ‘Tom’. For what St Thomas is
describing is the way he understands the mind to grasp the objective and real essence of Tom
—that he is a ‘man’. And what David Hume rejected, apart from the very existence of mind as
an autonomous substance or even power of an autonomous soul, is the notion that there are
such objectively real essences that are grasped by the mind in the manner delineated by St
Thomas. As A. MacIntyre remarks in his article ‘Essence and Existence’ in the Encyclopedia
of Philosophy:

The mistake which Hobbes and Locke ascribed to Aristotelianism was that of confusing
the meaning of an expression with the nature of the object which the expression
characterizes. In the empiricist tradition this separation of questions of meaning from
questions of characterization continued to be influential. One consequence is that the
concept of the real essence is dropped altogether. Another is that philosophy itself

becomes defined as the study of meaning, as a linguistic enquiry.… [25]

Much of modern philosophy is influenced by empiricism on this point.

It might be recalled that in Hume, the concept is due to the association or combination of
‘ideas’, which are the interior images of sense-perceptions, passions or emotions. This is a
completely different approach than that of the authors we have been studying, St Thomas,
Evagrius Pontikos and St Augustine. For these authors recognize the existence of both the
essence of the material object—according to each author’s theory surely—and the domain of
the intelligible which cannot be reduced merely to the association or combination of interior
images of sense-perceptions, passions and emotions.

It is noteworthy that Hume also threw a very sceptical regard on the notion of cause and
effect, which is precisely one of the ‘first principles’ that St Thomas judged to be intuitively
evident to every man once he had understood the definitions of the terms. Modern
philosophy can be seen as a reaction against this aspect of mediæval philosophy too. This
reaction reaches its apogee in the philosophical tendencies expressed in and around
quantum mechanics, where time’s arrow is uncertain, causal relations are uncertain, all
things are uncertain and contradictories exist at one and the same time: all these positions
involve denials of first principles to which St Thomas judged the human intellect incapable of
refusing assent once it understood the terms. Although St Thomas did not spend any time on
geometry, the same denial of intuitive first principles is to be found in the special and general
theories of relativity, this time geometrically. Moreover, the physical interpretation of the
two theories of relativity involves propositions such as the variability of time which also
might be thought to deny principles which St Thomas would have considered intuitively
evident. An interesting question would be this: have St Thomas’ views on the intuitive
validity of the first principles been superseded, or will there come new theories in physics,
which theories themselves will be more ‘intuitive’ in the Thomist sense, which theories will
incorporate the data which are accounted for by the modern ‘counter-intuitive’ theories? For
no theory in physics is eternally true.

[10] See Chapter III, above; also the Digression on the Evagrian doctrine of contemplation and the Commentary on On
the Thoughts, Chapters 38–43 in Volume II.

[17] For a discussion by a non-Thomist Aristotelian scholar of the nature of the mind (nous) in Aristotle and of its
capacities according to Aristotle for intuitive apprehension beyond such first principles as the law of the excluded
middle, see the commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics by H. H. Joachim (Joachim pp. 288–91).

Chapter IV -- 12
To return to St Thomas, St Thomas establishes that in the conditions of the present life our
intellect cannot know the angels.[1] It is important to note that the doctrine that the
immaterial substances—the angels, for example—can be known by the intellect the more the
intellect is unmixed with imagination and sense is here taken by St Thomas to be a doctrine
of Plato. St Thomas explicitly states that the opinion of Aristotle is more in accord with
experience.

However, the tradition of the Philokalia quite explicitly follows the Platonic doctrine on this
point.

St Thomas establishes that we cannot know the immaterial substances by means of a

knowledge of material substances.[2] Having excluded a knowledge of immaterial
substances by direct, intuitive cognition, he is here excluding knowledge of them on the basis
of the sense-perception of material substances. Curiously, he here quotes in support of his
position St Dionysios the Areopagite, in a passage whose true interpretation must be seen in
the context of the Neoplatonizing philosophy of St Dionysios. St Dionysios argues that we
cannot know the immaterial substances by the material substances surely in the sense that
we cognize the immaterial substances by another, intuitive means of cognition, not that we
cannot cognize them at all, as St Thomas seems to want us to understand him.

St Thomas excludes the possibility that in the present conditions of our life our intellect can
know God directly.[3] His argument is a fortiori: Since we cannot know created immaterial
substances, even less can we know the uncreated immaterial substance, God. Therefore, St
Thomas says, we come to a knowledge of God by means of a knowledge of creatures. For the
first thing that we come to know, in our present state, is the essence of the material thing—
what we have just discussed above in St Thomas’ theory of concept formation. He quotes St
Paul on the matter: ‘By those things which have been made, the invisible things of God are
perceived when they are cognized.’[4] But for St Thomas this cognition is a propositional
knowledge derived by human ratiocination from the logical manipulation in propositions of
concepts abstracted from the sense-perceptions of objects.

In making these assertions about the limitations of the human intellect in its knowledge of
intelligible realities, St Thomas has foreclosed the spirituality of the Philokalia. It is true that
St Thomas in some fashion recognizes the possibility of supernatural knowledge of
intelligible realities by the grace of God in mystical experience, but the psychology of the
Philokalia is founded on the psychology of Evagrius Pontikos, which recognizes a natural
capacity in man intuitively to cognize intelligible realities.

We have now finished our outline of the anthropology and psychology of St Thomas Aquinas.

Before continuing on to the next topic, St Thomas’ theory of action, it is well to note a small
but significant difference between St Thomas’ system and the thought of St Gregory of Nyssa
in On the Making of Man: St Thomas asserts that before the Fall, the generation of the
human race would have occurred by means of the bodily union of the sexes.[5] In On the
Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa asserts that had the Fall not taken place, the generation
of the human race would have occurred by another, unknown method, and that God made
provision for the present method of human generation in his foreknowledge of the Fall.

In his discussion, St Thomas refers directly to St Gregory of Nyssa in On the Making of Man,
briefly outlines St Gregory of Nyssa’s views and concludes that they are contrary to reason. St
Thomas ends with a quotation from St Augustine:

Let it be far from us that we might suspect that the child would not have been
made without the sickness of pleasure (libidinis); but by that gesture of the will
those members would have been moved as the others, and without burning heat
and attractive excitement, with tranquillity of soul and body.[6]

A small point but significant.

[5] ST Ia, 98, 2. It is in this article that St Thomas remarks that the sense of Eve’s being a helper for Adam is in the
generation of the human race.

Chapter IV -- 13

We now wish to discuss St Thomas’ theory of human action. Our reason for doing this is
threefold. First, St Thomas’ theory of action is a very important part of his psychology. It
handles all questions of intentional movement, including simple intentional movements
such as raising one’s arm.

Second, as we shall see in Volumes II and III, Evagrius Pontikos and St Hesychios each
discuss a model of temptation and sin as a part of their ascetical doctrines. In fact, St
Hesychios’ own model of temptation and sin is an amalgam of the models of temptation and
sin of Evagrius Pontikos and of St Mark the Ascetic. There are certain similarities between St
Thomas’ model of human action and the model of human action presupposed in the models
of temptation and sin of Evagrius Pontikos, St Mark the Ascetic and St Hesychios. A
consideration of St Thomas’ theory of human action will help us better to understand the
issues involved.

Third, in Chapter I, above, we discussed projects in artificial intelligence which are based on
the presupposition that the human mind is nothing more than a hierarchy of algorithms. St
Thomas’ analysis of human action can be seen as an early attempt to construct a formal
model of human action, an attempt that is very similar to modern attempts to resolve the
human mind into algorithms. We think that a modern researcher into artificial intelligence
would find a study of St Thomas’ theory of human action useful in the design of robots.
Moreover, glances at this dimension of St Thomas’ theory of action will help us to grasp more
clearly some formal aspects of his theory.

St Thomas’ theory of human action, the preliminary to his own analysis of human moral
action, is very complex and we can only delineate its broad outlines. It is remarkable for its
rationalism and for its treatment of the human will as an intellectual appetite subordinate to
the reason. St Thomas places his theory of action in the context of his doctrine that the
human will is an appetite that by nature necessarily tends to the good, above all to the
Beatific Vision. It should be remarked that St Thomas’ model in the Summa Theologiae,
while certainly reflecting his own mature thought, was disputed after St Thomas’ death by
other Scholastics.[1]

St Thomas first establishes that it is proper to man to do all things for an end.[2] His asserts
that the only actions that are proper to or characteristic of man are actions of which man is
master, and that man is master of his actions only by means of his reason and his will.
Therefore, he says, following Aristotle, the only actions proper to a man are those which
proceed from a will which is exercised after due deliberation.

This is a very basic move on St Thomas’ part which sets the stage for his analysis of human
action: by asserting that what is properly human in an action is to act rationally for an end,
he has enabled himself to conduct an extremely detailed analysis of human action within a
very rationalistic and intellectualistic framework. For having isolated acting rationally for an
end as the essentially human aspect of an action, he can proceed to analyse ends and means,
and the interplay of the reason and the will in the choice and execution of the means to the
end. Although St Thomas is following Aristotle, his analysis is much more rationalistic.

St Thomas proceeds to establish that human actions are specified by their end.[3] The end of
an action is the goal or purpose of the man who does the action.

St Thomas establishes that human life has a final end.[4] This of course is beatitude, the
Beatific Vision, the vision of the essence of God, the direct knowledge of God, attainable in St
Thomas’ theology only upon death. This doctrine of the tendency of all men to beatitude St
Thomas has derived from St Augustine.

It is necessary for us to consider the source of St Augustine’s own doctrine in order for us to
be able to assess as we proceed the transformation that has taken place at St Thomas’ hands
of the Augustinian concept of beatitude. It seems to us that the source of St Augustine’s
doctrine of beatitude is Plotinus’ Enneads, which St Augustine read in the Latin translation
of Marie Victorinus. For we see in the Enneads the central role of eudaimonia in Plotinus’
system.[5] But this eudaimonia (literally: ‘happiness’) is clearly defined by Plotinus to be
union in eternity (i.e. beyond time but possibly in this life; not necessarily after death) with
the One, which is elsewhere called by Plotinus, God. This union is understood by Plotinus in
what today would be called ‘intellectualistic’ (although certainly mystical and, in our own
terminology, ‘intuitive’) terms. Moreover, although the person who experiences this mystical
union in eternity with the One may return to earth (i.e. to time and to the world of sense-
perception, as Plotinus surely did from his own repeated experiences of this union with the
One), he remains eudaimon: the event confers eudaimonia on him. In ordinary language, we
would say: ‘He has been enlightened.’
This doctrine of Neoplatonism St Augustine has transposed into the context of the Christian
Gospel, and he has reserved the fullness of it for the next life, surely a Scriptural position.
Now the atmosphere of Plotinus is completely different from the strict rationalism of St
Thomas as St Thomas applies that rationalism to Aristotelian metaphysics: Plotinus is a
pagan mystic. Now St Augustine is himself a Christian mystic, but he retains the flexibility of
Neoplatonism. Although St Thomas is also a Christian, with his rationalism and
intellectualism (in a different sense from the ‘intellectualistic’ mysticism of Plotinus), with
his rationalistic Aristotelianism, he has departed completely from the thought-world of
Plotinus and St Augustine: he retains, as we have seen, certain concepts of St Augustine,
derived ultimately from Plotinus, as he must, but he is really moving in a different thought-
world. This creates a rigidity in his handling of these concepts, as we have already seen and
shall see below.

Much of St Augustine’s own doctrine, especially his own psychology of the intelligence or
superior reason, of the divine light, of the nature of ‘understanding’ become noticeably more
comprehensible when seen in the light of Plotinus. For example, the intelligence or superior
reason is seen to be the capacity of the human soul to know God intuitively; the divine light is
seen to be a Christian adaptation of the Plotinian idea of the Mind (Nous) as immanent in
the soul; ‘understanding’ becomes not rational comprehension of propositions via
ratiocination, but the intuitive grasp by the soul of God in mystical union, so that St
Augustine’s ‘faith seeking understanding’ becomes a process of moving from belief in God to
mystical union with God, where the initial faith or belief is seen to be the foundation of, and
stepping-stone to, the mystical union with God, which itself takes place in fullness in the next
life.

To continue with St Thomas, St Thomas establishes that human life has only one final end.
[6] That of course is the Beatific Vision.

St Thomas establishes that everything that a man desires he desires in view of his final end.
[7] This is important for an understanding of how St Thomas ties his doctrine that all men
tend to the final end, beatitude, to his theory of concrete human actions. St Thomas says this:

It is necessary that a man desire (appetat) all that he desires on account of the final end, and this
appears by a double reason. First, since whatever a man desires, he desires under the aspect (ratione) of
 the good. For if something is not desired under the aspect of the good, which is the final end, it is
necessary that it be desired as tending to the perfect good, since the beginning of something is always
ordered towards its consummation, just as is shown both in those things which are made by nature and
in those things which are made by art; and thus the beginning of every perfection is ordered in the
consummated perfection, which itself is on account of the final end. Second, since in moving the desire
the final end disposes itself in the same manner as the first mover disposes itself in other movements.
However, it is manifest that secondary causes, when they move, do not move except insofar as they are
moved by the first mover. Whence secondary things that are desirable do not move the appetite except
by an ordering towards the first thing which is desirable, which is the final end.

St Thomas is giving two reasons why it is on account of the final end that a man desires all
the things that he desires. His first reason is that whatever a man desires, he desires because
it is good. But the good is the final end. Moreover, if something is desired but not because it
is good, it is desired because it tends to the final good. Thus, the beginning of a perfection is
ordered in relation to the perfection as that perfection will be when it is consummated, and
that consummated perfection is on account of the final end. St Thomas’ second reason is that
the final end, beatitude, has the same relation in moving the desire, or appetite, that the first
mover has in causing other movements. But secondary causes move things only insofar as
they are moved by the first mover. Therefore, secondary objects of desire move the appetite
only because of a relation they have to the final end.

This is an important doctrine, although it is not clear how it is to be integrated into the rest
of St Thomas’ theory of action. For St Thomas does not suggest that a man actually
deliberates consciously about the extent to which a possible end contributes to his beatitude
—though he certainly implies that a prudent man will so deliberate, so as to attain to the
Beatific Vision when he dies. For example, it occurs to me that it might be good to go for a
walk. St Thomas does not suggest that before deciding to go for a walk I consciously
deliberate whether going for a walk might or might not contribute to my attainment of the
Beatific Vision. However, he certainly implies that if I am prudent I will conduct all my
affairs with a view to my attainment to the Beatific Vision. Moreover, there is no doctrine in
St Thomas of unconscious motivations: it cannot be thought that St Thomas means that
unconsciously I evaluate my every action with a view to my possible beatitude. However, he
does mean, within the Aristotelian doctrine of final causes, that any end I choose is
necessarily ordered to the final end, beatitude, in the same way that a secondary mover is put
into motion by the first mover. This means that an object of desire, an end, can be an end
only insofar as it bears some intrinsic relation to the final end, beatitude, as to the final
cause, and that that relation is a relation of goodness. Moreover, St Thomas’ doctrine is that
the will, a rational desire, can only desire in view of the final end. This is a doctrine of the
nature of the will as desire: it can only move towards the Beatific Vision. However, that
doctrine is later qualified: God moves the will, a desire, towards the good, but before death it
is the intellect that presents to the will its good. Secondary goods, those other than the
Beatific Vision, can be good in one respect and ‘not good’ in another, so the will is not bound
to desire them or not to desire them: it has a freedom to move or not to move towards a
secondary good.

To what extent is the problem of the metaphysical nature of the will in St Thomas Aquinas as
a necessary desire or tendency towards the good or beatitude or the Beatific Vision, due to
the fact that St Thomas has injected the essentially psychological analysis of St Augustine
that all men seek after beatitude into a severely logical or rationalistic version of Aristotelian
philosophy; that is, that he has injected the psychological insight of St Augustine into
metaphysics, freezing it in a highly articulated logical system based on being and not on the
psychology of man, a system focused on the nature of a part of the soul called the will, which
must obey, along with another part of the soul called the reason, certain metaphysical rules?

St Thomas establishes that all men are in agreement in their desire for their final end,
beatitude.[8] This doctrine, just like the one in the preceding article, you either accept or
reject. For it is expressed throughout St Thomas’ theory of action in such a way as to be
tautologically true. Moreover, it has to be seen in the light of St Thomas’ doctrine that the
will is intrinsically a hunger or thirst after the Beatific Vision. Once the reader accepts that
definition, then all else follows. For how would one prove that every man had a hunger after
beatitude? How would one disprove it? A man’s actions can always be interpreted in such a
way that it might be said that the man hungered after beatitude in a mistaken way. And that
is what St Thomas does. In St Augustine, these propositions arise from a psychological, not
metaphysical, analysis, and in that setting they seem profound insights into human
psychology. In the setting of Aristotelian metaphysics, they seem both rigid and disputable.

St Thomas establishes that only man among creatures has beatitude as his final end.[9] Since
the animals and the lower creatures lack reason, they lack will, and they therefore cannot
pursue rational ends such as the Beatific Vision. The angels, however, already enjoy the
Beatific Vision.
This series of propositions is very important for it lays down the presuppositions of St
Thomas’ theory of action.

[1] To an extent we have drawn on A. Donagan’s article ‘Thomas Aquinas on human action’ in the Cambridge History
of Later Medieval Philosophy (Medieval pp. 642–54).

Chapter IV -- 14

St Thomas begins his analysis of human action by referring to St John of Damascus.[1] He

establishes that a voluntary act is an act which is a rational operation. St Thomas establishes
that a voluntary act or movement has two elements: that the agent act by an internal
principle—that is, not be moved from without—, and that the agent act for an end. He writes:

For this is the import of the word ‘voluntary’, that the movement and the act are
from the [agent’s] own inclination. And that is what the ‘voluntary’ is said to be
according to the definition of Aristotle, St Gregory of Nyssa and St John of
Damascus: not only that ‘of which the principle is internal’, but with the addition
of knowledge (scientia).[2]

St Thomas means by ‘knowledge’: conscious, rational apprehension or understanding of the

end, accompanied by deliberation over the end and over the means to the end.

St Thomas establishes that animals, although deprived of reason, have the exercise of the
‘voluntary’.[3] However, since they have an imperfect knowledge of the end—a mere sense-
perception of the object that constitutes the end—that voluntary aspect of their actions is
imperfect in comparison with the voluntary aspect of human actions. He writes:

Therefore in its perfect sense (rationem), the ‘voluntary’ follows perfect

knowledge (cognitionem) of the end—as, that is to say, someone, by the
apprehension of the end, and after deliberating over the end and over those
things which are towards the end, is able to be moved towards the end or not to
be moved. However, in an imperfect sense, the ‘voluntary’ follows imperfect
knowledge of the end—as, that is to say, apprehending the end, one does not
deliberate, but is moved suddenly to that very end. Whence, the ‘voluntary’ in its
 perfect sense is appropriate only to the rational nature, but in its imperfect sense
it is appropriate even to the brute animals.[4]

We see here the great emphasis that St Thomas places on the reason in his analysis of the
‘voluntary’. The ‘voluntary’ taken in its perfect sense is to be found only in those cases where
the end of the action—in St Thomas, actions which are not for a determinate, concrete end
cannot be voluntary—is fully known by the reason and where deliberation by the reason over
the end and over the means to the end precedes a decision whether to proceed to the end or
not to proceed at all. However, in cases where a passion overwhelms the man and without
deliberation he is suddenly moved towards the determinate, concrete end of the passion or,
to take another example, in cases where a brute animal is moved by a similar irrational
movement of the sensitive appetite, then the action is still voluntary, but only in an imperfect
sense.

St Thomas elsewhere remarks that to the extent that a man’s reason is incapacitated by this
sudden overwhelming by the passion—which overwhelming, St Thomas observes, always has
a bodily substrate—then the will does not operate.[5] How can such an action be voluntary
‘in an imperfect sense’, as St Thomas is saying here,[6] without the will being in operation, as
he is saying elsewhere?[7] Can, in St Thomas’ doctrine, an action be voluntary, even in an
imperfect sense, without the will being in operation? For according to St Thomas, the actions
of a brute animal are in an imperfect sense voluntary, even though brute animals necessarily
lack will, since they lack reason, and the will is a rational appetite. Of course, St Thomas
wishes to preserve the voluntariness of the movements of brute animals towards food or
sexual union, or on account of anger or rage, and the voluntariness of similar movements in
man when the reason is not in control; but he wishes also, for the sake of his moral analysis,
to distinguish sharply between such movements in man, and actions which are done by a
man on the basis of cool, rational deliberation about ends and means.

St Thomas himself solves this puzzle.[8] He explains that only rational beings have a will,
which is a rational appetite, but ‘voluntary’ can still be used in those cases where there is a
certain participation in the will according to a harmony with the will, and that in this sense
‘voluntary’ is attributed to the brute animals, that is to say, to the extent that by means of a
certain knowledge (i.e. sense-perception) they are moved to their end.
St Thomas is here defining the broad outlines of his doctrine of human action: human
actions are those in which the man rationally understands his end and rationally deliberates
over that end and over the means to attain it. Actions done by a man that lack rational
comprehension of the end and deliberation over the end and over the means to attain it are
not human actions, although they certainly are actions done by a man. St Thomas never
departs from this framework.

It is here, strangely enough, the St Thomas provides the first cue to the researcher into
artificial intelligence wishing to design a robot: limit the actions that the robot will
accomplish to those that fit this determinate, rationalistic model of human action; and,
moreover, resolve the basic model of the robot’s actions into a rational evaluation and
adoption of an end and deliberation over—algorithmic search for and evaluation of—various
means to attain that end, followed by execution of the means selected, so that the adopted
end is attained.

St Thomas establishes that the ‘voluntary’ can exist even without overt action, since either we
may want not to act or we may not want to act—these are two different things. He writes:

That is called the ‘voluntary’ which is said to be from the will. In one manner,
directly, because, that is to say, it proceeds from another thing inasmuch as that
thing is the agent, as heating proceeds from heat. In another way, indirectly,
from the very fact that the other thing does not act, just as the sinking of the ship
is said to be from the captain inasmuch as he desisted from navigating.

But it must be known that that which follows a deficiency of action is not always reduced to the agent, as
to its cause, from the fact that the agent did not act, but only then, when he could and should have acted.
Therefore, if the captain were not able to direct the ship, or if the navigation of the ship had not been
entrusted to him, the sinking of the ship would not be imputed to him, that sinking which occurred
through the absence of a captain. When, therefore, the will, by willing and acting, can prevent that which
is ‘not to will’ and ‘not to act’, and sometimes must, then that which is ‘not to will’ and ‘not to act’ is
imputed to it as if existing by that very fact; and thus the ‘voluntary’ can come to exist without act: in
some cases, without an exterior act but with an interior act, as when one wills not to act; at another time,

however, even without an interior act, as when one does not will [to act]. [9]
We can here see the legalism of St Thomas’ approach to moral theology. This is reasoning
suitable to a law-book on negligence. Indeed, in St Thomas there is no discontinuity between
moral theology and the law: the one flows imperceptibly into the other in a unitary social
world in which the theologian analyses moral issues so that the legislator can write the
appropriate laws to implement the moral judgements of the Church. In this regard, The
Pocket Aquinas contains a very interesting letter of St Thomas in which he replies to an
invitation to analyse the moral implications of the practice in the fabric trade at Florence of
offering discounts for quick payment of commercial accounts, evidently so that the
authorities at Florence can properly regulate this practice.[10] There is no sense in St
Thomas of the modern post-Christian world in which the secular law is primary and religion
is a private ‘matter of conscience’ completely subordinate to the secular state.

To continue with our remarks on the use of St Thomas’ model in the design of robots, St
Thomas here distinguishes two special cases in the selection of an end: the decision not to act
and the decision not to decide whether or not to act. These are real alternatives.

In the case of human moral actions, St Thomas is saying that in some cases either of these
two alternatives conveys moral responsibility for the consequences of the inaction. This is a
doctrine of moral negligence.

St Thomas establishes that the will cannot be forced by violence, or indeed by any necessity.
[11]

St Thomas establishes that acts which proceed on account of force are involuntary.[12]

St Thomas establishes that fear itself does not absolutely deprive an act of its voluntary
character.[13]

These propositions are necessary for St Thomas to establish for the sake of the analysis of
moral acts which are done ‘under duress’: how much ‘duress’ is enough to deprive a moral
act of its voluntary nature and the agent of moral—and, in St Thomas’ world, legal—
responsibility?
St Thomas establishes that concupiscence (in our terminology, desire) does not cause an act
to be involuntary.[14] This is of course necessary to his analysis of moral responsibility
where sins of the flesh are involved. However, this remark is to be considered in the light of
St Thomas’ remarks, referred to above, where St Thomas establishes that when a passion
overwhelms a man, then his reason is incapacitated.

St Thomas establishes that ignorance causes a sort of involuntariness in our actions.[15]

St Thomas then proceeds to establish that the circumstances of an act—here St Thomas

follows both Aristotle and Cicero, the Stoic rhetorician—are important elements in the
theological evaluation of the act.[16] He then enumerates the circumstances: the author of
the act, where, with what assistance and with what instruments, why, how, when and what
actually was done. Of these, St Thomas says, the most important are why the act was done
and those things in which was the actual practice of the act. This is a very legalistic approach
to moral theology: these circumstances are no different from the criteria in law for the
evaluation of a justiciable act.

St Thomas establishes that the will tends only to the good. In this he remarks that the will is
a rational appetite. Every appetite has some good as its end. He writes:

The will is a certain rational appetite; however, there is no appetite except of the
good. The reason for this is that an appetite is nothing other than a certain
inclination towards something of him who has the appetite.

Let us interject a remark here. This is a very important definition for St Thomas’ psychology:
the will is an appetite just as hunger or thirst are appetites. We might even say that the will is
a hunger or thirst after the good.

However, nothing inclines except to something similar and appropriate.

Therefore, since each thing is a certain good, as much it is being (ens) and
substance (substantia), it is necessary that every inclination should be towards
the good; and from that the Philosopher [Aristotle] says in the Ethics, I: ‘The
good is what all desire.’
Let us interject another remark. Here we see the tautological nature of St Thomas’ definition
of the will: every object is a good because it has being and substance; therefore every
inclination of the will towards an object is towards the good. But does a man’s will
necessarily tend towards the object because of the being and substance in it? St Thomas
proceeds in this way so as to preserve Aristotle, but from the point of view of human
psychology, his approach is arbitrary.

But it must be considered that because every inclination follows some form, the natural [i.e. vegetative]
appetite follows the form existing in nature. However, the sensitive appetite, or even the intellectual
appetite, which is called the will, follows the apprehended [i.e. perceived] form. Therefore, just as that to
which the natural appetite tends is the good existing in a thing (in re), thus that to which the animal or
voluntary appetite tends is the apprehended good. Therefore, that to which the will tends in something
is not required to be the good truly in a thing (in rei veritate), but to be apprehended under the aspect of
the good (in ratione boni). And for this reason the Philosopher [Aristotle] says, in II Physics, 31, that:

‘The end is the good or the apparent good.’[17]

What is St Thomas saying? First he gives a not very persuasive reason—every thing has being
and substance, so it has some good—that every inclination of the will is towards the good.
That is to lay the foundation for a very important assertion: ‘The good is what all desire.’ This
is fundamental: the will is an appetite or desire or hunger after the good. It would be fruitless
to approach St Thomas’ psychology without assimilating this basic point. The will is a sort of
magnet which is attracted to the Beatific Vision, but which can be attracted to lesser goods.
We have already seen, however, that in St Thomas’ doctrine, those lesser goods necessarily
exist in a metaphysical relation of goodness to the Beatific Vision as to a final cause.

Next, in some very elliptical argumentation, St Thomas says the following: The natural (or,
‘vegetative’)[18] appetite follows the form existing in nature. The natural appetite is simply
the appetite as regards those powers of the human soul such as nutrition, growth and
reproduction that are found in the vegetative soul in the Aristotelian schema of the kinds of
soul. Although the vegetative appetite inclines towards the good existing in a thing—say, the
nutritional value of the food I eat—it is unconscious. For the vegetative soul operates at the
level of the unconscious biochemical processes of the body. That is the significance of what St
Thomas is about to say concerning the sensitive and intellectual appetites, that their ends
must be apprehended or perceived.
St Thomas then goes on to say that the sensitive appetite—that which relates to the desire,
whether for food or for sexual contact—is necessarily an appetite for something that is
perceived: I must see the food to want it; the member of the opposite sex to want her or him.
St Thomas then concludes that just as the natural or vegetative appetite follows the good
actually existing in a thing—the food, whatever it might be, has some good in it since it
actually exists and is food—the sensitive appetite, and even the will, inclines to the good that
is apprehended. What St Thomas means is this: The natural vegetative functions of my soul
seek after the good in the food I eat but unconsciously to me: I have no perception of my act
of digesting the food I have eaten. However, to desire the food that is before me, I must
perceive it as appetizing, and in order to will an end—say, to follow a healthy diet—I must
understand that end as good. I must perceive the food as good food in order to want to eat it
and I must understand the healthy diet as a good in order to will it. Of course, what St
Thomas is driving at is that I might be deceived: the apple, say, might be a plastic display
item; the diet which I understand to be good might be unhealthy. Hence his quotation from
Aristotle: the end or object of the will is the good or the apparent good.

We remarked above that St Thomas’ doctrine that men will the good seemed to be
psychologically arbitrary. Here we see him to say that men will the good as they apprehend
it. Has he covered our objection? No. Tautologically, you can always produce an analysis that
the man willed the good or the apparent good whatever it was he actually did.

It is well to remark here that what today we ordinarily consider hunger and sexual desire
have elements that are subsumed both under the vegetative soul and under the animal or
sensitive soul. That is, there are bodily functions related to nutrition, growth and
reproduction which operate in man at the unconscious, biochemical level, including
involuntary bodily movements related to hunger or to sexual desire. These are functions of
the vegetative soul of man. But there are also functions related to nutrition, growth and
reproduction which operate in man at the conscious level that depends on sense-perception
and which therefore are subject in St Thomas’ doctrine to conscious control by the reason.
These are functions of the animal or sensitive soul of man. In the present article, St Thomas
is saying that the unconscious appetites of the vegetative soul automatically seek after the
good in the thing, and that the objects of the conscious appetites of the animal or sensitive
soul must be apprehended or perceived as good in order to be desired. Thus in the case
either of hunger or of sexual desire, there are aspects which are unconscious, biochemical
and automatic and there are aspects which are conscious, dependent on sense-perception
and subject to the control of reason. Later we will see that St Thomas explicitly limits the
conscious control of the reason over the members of the body to those members of the body
which are subject to the animal or sensitive soul.[19]

For the researcher into artificial intelligence, the import of this article is that the circuitry
which maintains the basic functions of the robot such as the supply of electrical current
should be completely separate from the circuitry and programming which support the
‘conscious’ functions of the robot, including its appetitive and intellect subsystems. Of
course, the vegetative subsystem will have to send a signal to the desire subsystem when the
battery runs low so that the robot feels ‘hungry’.

St Thomas establishes that the will tends not only towards the end but also towards the
means. He writes this:

‘Will’ is sometimes said to be the very power (potentia) by which we will; sometimes, however, it is said
to be the act of the will itself. If, therefore, we speak of ‘will’ in accordance with its naming the power
(potentia), then it extends itself to the end and to the things which are towards the end. For every power
(potentia) extends itself to those things in which the nature (ratio) of its object can in some manner be
encountered, just as vision extends itself to all things of whatever sort that participate in some manner
in colour. However, the nature (ratio) If, however, we speak of ‘will’ in accordance with its properly
naming the act, then properly it is necessary to speak that much of the end. For every act denominated
from a power names the simple act of that power, as ‘to cognize (intelligere)’ names the simple act of the
intellect (intellectus). However, the simple act of a power is in that which is according to itself the object
of the power; that, however, which on account of itself is good and willed is the end. Whence the will
[where ‘will’ is here taken to refer to the power of the will] is properly of the end. Those things which are
towards the end are not good or willed on account of themselves, but out of an ordering towards the
end: whence the will is not carried towards them except to the extent they are carried towards the end,
whence that itself which is willed in them is the end. And thus ‘to cognize (intelligere)’ is properly of
those things which according to themselves are known, that is to say, of the [first] principles; however, it
is not said of those things which are known through the [first] principles that they are cognized, except
inasmuch as the [first] principles themselves are considered in them. For just as the end has itself in
things which can be desired (appetibilibus), thus the [first] principle has itself in things which can be
cognized (intelligibilibus). of the good (which is the object of the power of the will), is encountered not

only in the end, but even in those things which are towards the end. [20]

What St Thomas is saying in this difficult but important passage is that a power such as the
intellect or the will has as its object both those things with which it works directly and those
things through which it works indirectly. However, the simple act of the power, named from
the power by the use, in Latin, of the infinitive related to the noun that names the power or
even by the use of the same noun, has as its object only that with which the power works
directly. Thus ‘intellect’, taken as a power, has as its object the first principles—for example,
the law of the excluded middle—and all the things in which the first principles are to be
found. Similarly, ‘will’, taken as a power, has as its object the end and all the means to the
end. However, ‘intellect’, taken as the simple act of the intellect, the simple or primitive act of
cognition, has only the first principles as its object. Similarly, ‘will’, taken as the simple act of
the will, the primitive act of willing, has only the end as its object.

In regard to artificial intelligence, we here see another indication how to proceed: The
intellect subsystem will deal only with logical evaluation, arithmetic computation and such-
like. When it is operating, the intellect subsystem will occupy itself only with the
computation of a logical or arithmetic result. The will subsystem, however, will deal only
with ends and means to attain those ends, and those only insofar as it puts ends and means
into place as actual goals that the robot will work to achieve. Moreover, when the will
subsystem is operating, it will operate only to secure the actual accomplishment of a goal,
which of course itself might be the means to some end. We will see that the goal is evaluated
by the intellect subsystem and adopted by the will subsystem after it has been communicated
to it by the intellect subsystem.

St Thomas establishes that the will does not tend towards the end and towards the means to
the end with one and the same act.[21] This is important for St Thomas to establish so that
he can separate the willing of the end from the willing of the means: he must account for the
choice of one means over another in view of a single end.

In artificial intelligence, the significance is that the designer of the robot must separate the
programming in the will subsystem that relates to the adoption of the end from the
programming in the will subsystem that relates to the adoption of the means to the end. But
it is well to bear in mind that there can be a hierarchy of ends and means, so that a means as
seen from the point of view of its related end can be seen as an end from the point of view of
its own means.
St Thomas establishes that the will is moved by the intellect. St Thomas explains that the
intellect moves the will in presenting to it its object. That is, the intellect selects the object or
end that the will adopts. This is an important move in St Thomas’ analysis. The will is a
hunger and thirst after the good, but it is the intellect, the reason, which presents it with the
good after which it will hunger. St Thomas says this:

As much as something has need of being moved by something else, by that much it is in potency
(potentia) towards more things; for it is necessary that that which is in potency (potentia) be reduced to
act (actus) by something which is in act, and this is ‘to move’. However, a certain power of the soul
comes to be in potency (potentia) in regard to various things in two ways: in one way, as much as it can
do or not do; in the other way, as much as it can do this or that—just as the sight sometimes sees in act,
and sometimes does not see; and sometimes it sees white and sometimes it sees black. It therefore has
need of being moved as much towards the two, that is to say, as much towards the exercise or the use of
the act, and as much towards the determination of the act: the first of these is on the part of the subject,
which sometimes comes to be doing and sometimes not to be doing; however, the other is that which is
on the part of the object according to which the act is specified; however the motion of the subject itself

is from some agent. And as every agent acts on account of an end, as has been demonstrated, [22] the
principle of this movement is from the end. And in that is why the art to which pertains the end moves
by its command the art to which pertains that which is towards the end: just as the navigational art
commands the art of shipbuilding, as is said [by Aristotle] in II Physics, 25. However, good in general,
which has the nature (rationem) of the end, is the object of the will; and on account of this the will on its
part moves the other powers (potentia) of the soul to their acts; for we make use of the other powers
when we will. For the ends and the perfections of all the other powers are included under the object of
the will as particular goods of a sort. However, the art or power to which pertains the universal end
always moves to action the art or power to which pertains the particular end contained by that universal
end. Thus the leader of the army, who intends the common good, that is to say, the order of the whole
army, moves by his command some one of the tribunes, who intends the order of one of the units. But
the object [of the act] moves by determining the act in the sense of the formal principle by which in
natural things the action is specified, just as [the act of] heating is [specified] by heat [i.e. the formal
principle ‘heat’ specifies the act ‘heating’]. However the first formal principle is being (ens) and
universal truth, which are the object of the intellect; and on account of this, the motion of the intellect

moves the will in this manner, as presenting to it its object. [23]

What this means is that, first, according to Aristotelian metaphysics, for a power of the soul
to pass from potentiality to actualization, it must be moved by something. But this motion, or
change, is to be taken in two senses: In the first sense, the power can be exercised or not.
This is a matter of the subject, of the power itself. In the second sense, the power is moved in
that it is determined by its object: once I see, the content of my sight is determined by what I
actually see: the object might be white or black, and that object determines the content of my
sight. Similarly, I may will or not will, but once I will, the content of my willing is determined
by what I will: my object or my end or my goal. However, in the case of the powers of the soul
other than the will, it is the will, whose object is the good, that moves them to exercise their
power. The will commands them, just as the general commands his lieutenants. However, it
is the intellect that presents to the will its goal.

This relation of the will to all the other powers of the soul—it moves them to the exercise of
their power—and of the intellect to the will—it presents the will with its object—is very
important to St Thomas’ analysis. It is the heart of his theory of human action.

Let us remark here that the notion of ‘moving’ something is a technical term in Aristotelian
metaphysics. It simply means that if something moves something else, then it causes it to
act: it causes it to pass from potentiality to actualization. But in Aristotelian metaphysics,
causes can be final: when I will an end, then it is as final cause that that end moves my will in
determining its content. It would be fruitless to try to analyse this notion in terms of modern
theories of causation. It simply means that the object of my willing is my goal and that the
content of my willing has been determined by that goal taken as goal.

Next, St Thomas is establishing an order among the powers of the soul. First is the intellect,
which presents to the will its object. Then the will moves the other powers of the soul to
action, as a general commands his inferior officers. The will can even move the intellect. But
higher than the will is the intellect, which presents to the will its end. This is a hierarchy of
powers of the soul. It is fundamental to St Thomas’ model of human action.

It should be noted that in St Thomas’ doctrine, the relationship between the intellect and the
will is strongly and explicitly reciprocal: the will can set the intellect in motion, as when by
an act of the will we set about learning mathematics; more importantly, for the intellect to
give the will its command, the intellect must previously have been set in motion by the will.

In artificial intelligence, what we can take from this, if we treat the powers of the soul as
separate subsystems of the robot, is that there is a hierarchical relation among the
subsystems: the will is the executive subsystem which issues commands to all the other
subsystems. However, the will subsystem receives its goal from the intellect subsystem.
Moreover, there is an interactive relationship between the will subsystem and the intellect
subsystem: the one can put the other into operation. St Thomas has provided the researcher
into artificial intelligence with a model of the internal logical organization of a robot.

Let us now look at the notion of ‘subject’ in what St Thomas has said. He cannot mean that
there is a ‘subject’, a person, behind the will that is pushing the will to will: that would
involve him in an infinite regression of wills and subjects. However, he has to account for the
fact that in Aristotelian metaphysics, something that comes to be in act that was not in act
has to be moved by something else to the exercise of that act. A power of the soul that was
not in act has to be moved by something in order to pass from potentiality to act.

For the lesser powers of the soul, St Thomas has no problem: the will moves them to act.

For the intellect, the matter is somewhat more ambiguous, for the will can move the intellect,
and must move it, in order for the intellect later to command the will. However, since it is the
intellect which commands the will, or, here, presents to the will its object, how do things
start off? How is it that the will itself is originally moved to act on the intellect? St Thomas
later posits that the only external cause that can move the will is God himself, and that not in
a necessary way.

While later St Thomas asserts that the will can cause itself to will, he both restricts that
notion and interposes an act of the intellect.

The problem is this: St Thomas is faced with providing causal explanations for human action
at the level of the mutual relations of powers of the soul, within the Aristotelian metaphysics
of the four causes. But he runs up against the irreducible freedom of man: a man acts. There
is a tendency discernible in St Thomas’ analysis of human action to avoid the fundamental
reality of human freedom. For each power of the soul is set in motion by another power of
the soul, at the risk of losing the person who acts freely.

In artificial intelligence, the problem is succinctly put: the designer must avoid a situation in
which the will subsystem is eternally waiting to be put into motion by the intellect subsystem
while the intellect subsystem is eternally waiting to be put into motion by the will subsystem.
Things have to get a start somewhere. We would suggest that the designer start them off in
the will subsystem. He should design the will subsystem to operate cyclically so that every so
often it puts the intellect subsystem into action to see how things are and to present any
goals that it might discover based on an evaluation of possible ends, especially in view of data
from the perceptual and vegetative subsystems. However, the difference between a robot and
a merely automatic machine is that in a robot things do not depend merely on the perceptual
subsystems: in the robot, the will and the intellect subsystems together constitute a principle
of autonomous action: the robot can by itself, independently of sensory input, decide what to
do.

Chapter IV -- 15

St Thomas establishes that the will can be moved by the sensitive appetite.[1] In our
terminology, the sensitive appetite is the passionate part of the soul, the temper and the
desire taken together. This is important for an understanding of how St Thomas approaches
the matter of how a person acts or does not act on the basis of his passions or emotions. St
Thomas says this:

However, it is manifest that the sensitive appetite changes the man to some
disposition according to the passion. Whence, inasmuch as a man is in a certain
passion, something appears to him appropriate that does not appear thus to him
when he is outside the passion: just as something appears good to the angry man
that does not appear good to the man who is calm. And in this way the sensitive
appetite moves the will—from the point of view of its object.[2]

What St Thomas is saying is that the passions move the will only in the sense that they
modify the man’s apprehension of the good, goal or end. We will see that this applies to the
case where the passion has not completely overwhelmed the man and incapacitated his
reason.[3]

The researcher into artificial intelligence might find this difficult to implement in a robot,
since what is involved is the relation of the robot’s ‘emotions’ to its goals. However, it would
be the starting-point for the introduction of affective coloration into the behaviour of the
robot. Difficult. However, we propose the following: Let the designer design a desire
subsystem and a temper subsystem. Let these two subsystems be dependent on the
vegetative and perceptual subsystems of the robot, which subsystems would of course be
based on St Thomas’ analyses of the vegetative soul and of perception, including the four
internal senses. Let the desire subsystem respond with hunger, say, to a low-battery
condition, and with joy, sadness, Eros (amor), hatred and such-like to those things which the
robot perceived. Let the desire subsystem transmit messages on its state to the intellect
subsystem so that the intellect subsystem evaluates ends in various ways according to the
state of the desire subsystem. Since the robot must necessarily monitor (‘perceive’) the
progress of its accomplishment of means in relation to its ends, let the temper subsystem
respond to perceived impediments to the accomplishment of the robot’s actions with
bravery, fear, hope and such-like: St Thomas later says that the temper responds to the
difficulty of attaining the desirable or of avoiding the undesirable. Let the temper subsystem
send messages on its state to the intellect and will subsystems: for example, if the temper
should become incensed, then it might send a message to fortify the will to persist and
another message to alter the intellect subsystem’s criteria for the evaluation of ends. Of
course the temper subsystem would also have to respond to perceived threats to the robot—
or perhaps even to the robot’s master!—and send the appropriate messages, whether of fear
or of anger, to the intellect and will subsystems.

St Thomas establishes that the will can move itself.[4] It is in our power, he says, to will or
not to will, something that would be impossible if the will could not move itself. He writes
this:

[Contrary Assertion:] But it is the contrary, since the will is master of its act (actus), and in the will itself
is ‘to will’ or ‘not to will’, which would not be the case if it did not have it in its power to move itself to
willing. Therefore it itself moves itself.

[Body of Article:] As has been said above, [5] it pertains to the will to move the other powers [of the

soul] on account of the end, which is the object of the will. But as has been said, [6] the end has the
same role in appetites that the [first] principle has in things that are understood. It is manifest, however,
that the intellect, in that it knows the [first] principle, leads itself from potency (potentia) to act (actus),
insofar as it pertains to the understanding of conclusions, and in this way moves itself. And similarly the

will, in that it wills an end, moves itself to willing those things which are towards the end. [7]
It might be thought that here St Thomas has replied to our difficulties with the freedom of
the person to which we referred above.[8] For here he argues in the contrary assertion that
the will can move itself to will. However, in the body of the article he states that the will
moves itself to will the means to the end that it has adopted, thus restricting the nature of the
self-movement of the will, as he himself later clarifies.[9]

This article is otherwise important for an understanding of how ends and means are tied
together in the will: when I will an end, my will moves itself to will the means too. However,
St Thomas later clarifies that an act of the intellect caused by the will interposes itself: having
adopted the end, the will moves the intellect to deliberate over possible means to the end,
and after that deliberation adopts the means to the end. We will encounter deliberation just
below.

In artificial intelligence, once the will subsystem has received its goal from the intellect
subsystem, then the will subsystem must put itself into operation to adopt the means to the
end. Having accepted the end, it must send a message to the intellect subsystem to search for
and evaluate possible means to accomplish the end, that is, to perform an act of deliberation
over the possible means to the end.

St Thomas establishes that the will can be moved to the exercise of its act by an external
object.[10] He says this:

Inasmuch as the will is moved by its object, it is manifest that it can be moved by
something external. But in regard to its being moved to the exercise of its act, it
is necessary to posit that the will is moved by some external principle. For every
thing which is an agent sometimes in act and sometimes in potency needs to be
moved by some mover. However, it is manifest that the will begins to will
something when it has not previously willed it. Therefore it is necessary that it
be moved to willing by something.[11]

As we have already seen, as regards the actual content of the act of willing, the will is moved
or determined by something external to it, its object. But, St Thomas wants to say, this also is
true in the case where the will is moved in the sense of being put into action at all: since the
will up to a certain time was not willing its goal and then came to be willing that goal,
something external put it into operation. Here we see the freedom of the human person
running up against the metaphysical necessity, in St Thomas’ Aristotelian system, of the
movement of the will’s being caused by something. St Thomas then turns to examine just
what external causes can move our will.

St Thomas denies that the will is moved in a direct way by the celestial bodies.[12] That is, he
denies the necessity of astrological influences on human action.

St Thomas establishes that only God among external causes can move our will.[13] The
clearest presentation of what St Thomas means is this:[14]

As universal mover, God moves the will of man to the universal object of the
will, which is the good, and without this universal motion, man is not able to will
anything. However, by reason man determines himself to willing this or that
which is truly good or the apparent good. But sometimes, however, God in a
special way moves certain persons to willing something determinate which is
good, as in those whom he moves by grace, as is said below.[15]

It seems to us that while St Thomas has found the solution to his problem of the
metaphysical origin of the movement of the will to act or not to act in the fact that God
moves the will to the good as universal mover, he has not answered our objection concerning
the freedom of the person. For, first of all, we see that only sometimes does God by a special
grace move someone to will a determinate, good end. Moreover, St Thomas emphasizes that
‘by reason man determines himself to willing this or that which is truly good or the apparent
good.’ But St Thomas has not yet explained how things ‘start off’: why the intellect came to
begin its act of reasoning that led to its presenting the will with the real or apparent good. St
Thomas elsewhere[16] posits that the reason commands the will, an act of the will being
presupposed in the act of the reason—and, similarly, that the will puts the reason into
operation, an act of the reason being presupposed in the act of the will—but we do not see
how he escapes an endless chain of causal relations among the powers of the soul. When I
woke up this morning, what was it that made me get out of bed? Was it an act of my will? Or
an act of my intellect that presented my will with its object? If it was an act of my will, why
did my will come to act, since it had need of an external cause to bring it from potentiality to
act? If it was an act of my intellect, why did my intellect come to pass from potentiality to
act? For I was asleep. An appeal to habit merely evades the issue. The problem is in the
attempt of St Thomas to give an Aristotelian causal analysis of the freedom of the human
person.

St Thomas establishes that the will naturally tends towards certain things.[17] For, he says,
the intellect naturally comprehends certain things, and since the will follows the intellect, it
too naturally tends towards a certain thing. That certain thing is ‘good in general’, towards
which the will naturally tends, as each power of the soul tends towards its object. The final
end, beatitude, the Beatific Vision, plays the role for the will—that of final end to which the
will naturally tends—that the first principles of reason play for the intellect. But just as the
intellect can occupy itself with contingent propositions, thus the will can tend to ends other
than the Beatific Vision. Moreover, the will naturally can tend to the ends of all the other
powers of the soul, since it is by use of his will that a man puts all the other powers of the
soul into operation.

This is a very important and central doctrine of St Thomas’ theory of action and of his
psychology in general. The human will naturally tends towards the Beatific Vision just as the
intellect naturally occupies itself with the first principles. However, before death, it is
possible for the will naturally to tend to ends other than the Beatific Vision, just as the
intellect naturally can occupy itself with contingent propositions. The will is a hunger, a
desire. In the first place it is a hunger after the Beatific Vision. In the second place, in this life
it can hunger after secondary goals. We have already seen, however, that these secondary
goals have, in St Thomas’ doctrine, an intrinsic metaphysical relation of goodness to the final
end of the Beatific Vision. Moreover, in St Thomas’ doctrine the intellect by an act of
reasoning presents to the will the secondary goal.

In artificial intelligence, we admit to finding it difficult to cull a lesson from this very
important doctrine, possibly because robots are machines. It seems that the import of this
doctrine for the will subsystem is that it must be designed always to aim for the ‘good’. But it
is the intellect subsystem that must provide the will subsystem with its goal.

St Thomas establishes that the will is not necessarily moved towards its object.[18] The will
is moved in two manners: in the first place, in regard to the exercise of its act of actually
willing; in the second place, in regard to the determination of the content of that act, which
depends on the object willed. In the first case, the will is not moved necessarily by any object,
since it is within our power not to think of a thing and therefore not to will it. In the second
case, certain objects or ends necessarily move the will as to its determination, while other
objects or ends do not necessarily move the will as to its determination. Therefore, if one
presents to the will an object or end which is good universally and according to every
consideration (i.e. the Beatific Vision), then the will, if it wills anything, will tend towards
that object or end, because it would not be able to will anything opposed to it. (Recall that the
will is a hunger after the perfect good, the Beatific Vision.) If, however, the intellect were to
present the will with an object or end which under some aspect were not good, then the will
would not necessarily tend towards that object or end. St Thomas states:

And since the deprivation of some good has the nature (rationem) of the ‘not
good’, only the good which is perfect and in which nothing is lacking, that is to
say beatitude [i.e. the Beatific Vision], is that which the will cannot prevent itself
from willing. However, in the case of particular goods of any sort, as much as
they are deficient in some good, they can be perceived as ‘not good’, and
according to this consideration they can be repudiated or approved by the will,
which can be moved in the same matter by different considerations.[19]

We see here the central role of St Thomas’ definition of the will as a hunger or thirst for the
good: when the will is presented with the perfect good, beatitude, it cannot prevent itself
from willing it. St Thomas goes on to say that except for the Beatific Vision, every good has
from some point of view or other something ‘not good’ in it and that such a secondary good
can therefore be accepted or rejected by the will—note that it is the will that accepts or rejects
the end, even though the end is presented to it by the intellect—according to how that end is
viewed.

There is some ambiguity in this. A good other than the Beatific Vision has some deprivation
or other of the good, which deprivation or lack of the good is construed to be the ‘not good’.
Hence, St Thomas says, the will can repudiate or approve such a secondary good depending
on different considerations. But surely in his doctrine, it is the intellect that evaluates the
end, not the will. Hence, it must be the intellect, not the will, which deliberates over the end,
whether to pursue it or not, just as St Thomas implies elsewhere.[20] And does not the
intellect present to the will its end, as St Thomas says?[21] Surely St Thomas does not want
to assert that the will has a judgement of the goodness of a proposed end, and that according
to various considerations: surely that is the work of the intellect.

The problem here is this: St Thomas wishes to preserve both the superiority of the intellect
over the will and the freedom of the man to decide. The superiority of the intellect over the
will, which we see in St Thomas’ doctrine that the reason presents to the will its end, implies
that the intellect determines the will; St Thomas later speaks of the command that the
intellect issues to the will, what to will; this doctrine accords with the notion that the will is a
hunger: the intellect directs the hunger in one direction or another, and that that is what it
means to will something. However such a doctrine does not preserve the freedom of man to
decide. For by implication the choice is always the product of syllogistic reasoning. Here,
however, in order to preserve the freedom of the man to decide, St Thomas asserts that the
will actually can choose or not choose one particular good over another based on different
considerations. But his doctrine of the relation of the intellect to the will, which puts all the
weight on the intellect, does not leave him with any room in the will for the will to exercise
discretion: he has defined it as a hunger to which the intellect presents the goal, what to
hunger after.

The matter is complicated. For in a certain place,[22] St Thomas, evidently following a

passage of St John of Damascus that we will quote later,[23] mentions both deliberation over
the end, whether the end is worth pursuing, and deliberation over the means to the end.
However, in his treatment of deliberation as a separate stage of human action,[24] he limits
deliberation to a search for and evaluation of the means to the end.

How does St Thomas Aquinas understand the freedom of man? For his apparatus of the
causal interactions of the will and the intellect seems to remove the freedom of decision of
man. The intellect presents the object or good to the will. Can the will refuse to accept it?
Why would it do so? The will and the intellect are powers of the soul; when we speak of
powers of the soul and the causal relations among them, where is the person? When the
intellect presents the object or the good to the will, which is a hunger after the good, where is
the person who chooses? Is he in his will? In his intellect? In both? St Thomas says that the
man is the composite of soul and body. How does he understand, then, the relation between
the person and the powers of the soul? For I am a conscious agent and I deliberate over the
end and the means to the end, and I am the conscious agent who assents to the end. What is
the connection between this I who deliberates and this I who assents to the end? Moreover,
since by St Thomas’ own admission, I have free decision, and that, he says, is precisely the
will, how is it that my will—or I acting in my will—can decide? Do I freely accept to do a thing
or not? What does it mean for the intellect to present the object to the will? To what extent
can the will deliberate whether to do a thing or not? Can it merely accept or reject the result
of the deliberation of the intellect, whether over the end or over the means to the end? Can
the will apply criteria that have not been applied by the intellect? That seems absurd.

In artificial intelligence, the implications of this article of the Summa are two. First, the
designer of the robot could program the robot to respond to him, or to the ‘master’ to whom
he gave the robot, in a special, unrestricted way. Second, we here see the central role of the
intellect subsystem in the evaluation, from various points of view and according to different
criteria, whether the will subsystem should accept or reject a possible end. However, it is the
will subsystem that adopts the end or not, evidently on the basis of the command or
instruction of the intellect subsystem: we do not think that St Thomas’ model allows for
evaluation of the goal from within the will subsystem. The same end might or might not be
evaluated positively by the intellect subsystem depending on the circumstances in which the
robot found itself, its perceived context. The significance of this should become clear if the
researcher reflects that he can design the robot to have a fixed number of ends, each of which
is programmed into the robot as a possible end, and a fixed repertoire of means, each of
which the robot can execute—although there would be a programmed flexibility in the
relationship of means to ends.

Chapter IV -- 16

St Thomas establishes that the will is not necessarily moved by the inferior appetite (i.e. by
the temper or by the desire). What St Thomas says is this:

As has been said above, the passion of the sensitive appetite moves the will out of the fact that the will is
moved by its object, as much, that is to say, as the man, disposed in some fashion by the passion, judges
something to be suitable and good that he would not judge thus, being outside the passion. However, the
change by the passion of the man in this way occurs in two manners. In the first case, the reason is
 totally bound and the man does not have the use of reason, just as occurs in those who on account of the
vehemence of the anger or desire become furious or mindless, according to and on account of some one
or other corporeal perturbation. However, passions of this sort do not occur without a corporeal
modification, and from these sorts of things [i.e. these modifications of the body] is the explanation
(ratio) [of this sort of condition], just as in the case of brute animals, which of necessity follow the
impetus of the passion. In these things, therefore, there is no movement of the reason and, by
consequence, neither of the will. However, in the second case, the reason is not totally absorbed by the
passion, but to a certain extent there remains the free judgement of reason; and according to this there
remains something of the movement of the will. As much, therefore, as the reason remains free and not
subject to the passion, by that much the movement of the will which remains does not by necessity tend
to that to which the passion inclines: and thus, either the movement of the will is not in the man, but he
is dominated solely by the passion; or, if there should exist movement of the will, he does not by

necessity follow the passion.[1]

This is a very important passage for our grasp of how St Thomas understands the relation
between reason and emotion (to use modern terms) in moral, psychological and even legal
theory. This doctrine, and ones similar to it, have coloured Catholic thinking on human
psychology since St Thomas. In countries which have been deeply Catholic, this doctrine has
passed into pastoral psychology and even into law.

What St Thomas is saying is clear: the passion, or emotion, alters the object of the will by
causing the man to evaluate the suitability or goodness of an end differently than he
otherwise might. However, this influence on the will has two degrees. The first degree is the
complete incapacitation of the reason, and therefore of the will, by the vehemence of the
passion, which vehemence has a bodily substrate. St Thomas was writing in the Thirteenth
Century, obviously from observation, but his observations have been validated even today by
biology: there is an endocrine reaction of anger which alters the bodily substrate, so much so
that the man may ‘lose his reason’; there are undoubtedly similar bodily reactions related to
desire. The second degree is the partial incapacitation of the reason and the will in those
cases where the access of passion is not so vehement as completely to incapacitate the
reason. This also accords with common observation today.

The implications for the Confessor are clear; the implications for the pastoral psychologist
are clear; the implications for the legal theorist are clear. For the Confessor, the issue is the
extent to which the man deliberately allowed himself to lose his reason; for the pastoral
psychologist, it is a matter of training the man to behave in ways that will prevent other such
episodes; for the legal theorist, it is a matter of assessing the guilt of, and the penalties to be
meted out to, a man who has committed a crime in either of these two conditions.

We here see the ambit within which St Thomas’ moral psychology moves: this is a
psychology which deals with man in society, a society regulated by the Church and the law
courts. There is nothing wrong with this; we are merely emphasizing this aspect of St
Thomas’ psychology so that the reader might grasp that psychology’s full dimensions.

However, there is an aspect of this psychology we would now like to discuss. This is the
relation of this psychology, at the level now being discussed by St Thomas, to the psychology
underlying the ascetical models of temptation and sin of Evagrius Pontikos, St Mark the
Ascetic and St Hesychios that we will discuss in Volumes II and III. We do not wish to
anticipate ourselves by presenting a full discussion of the models of temptation and sin that
we will discuss in the rest of this study, so let us restrict ourselves to some basic points. For
convenience, we will largely restrict ourselves to the model of Evagrius Pontikos that we will
discuss in Volume II.

The ascetical model of temptation and sin of Evagrius Pontikos is designed primarily for a
hermit. We say this because there are some fundamental differences in assumption from St
Thomas. St Thomas is discussing passion as concerns the layman who has not professed
religion: rarely does the professed monk reach the stage of such an access of passion that he
even partially loses his reason. Moreover, to take a simple model of the ascetical life, the
professed monk lives under obedience in community among other monks eating a frugal,
meatless diet for some years before becoming a hermit: this would make him somewhat
more purified of the passions than one would expect of a layman.

Let us suppose now that the monk has become a hermit.

The focus of the ascetical psychology of Evagrius Pontikos is on the inception of the ‘thought
(logismos)’ in the mind’s eye of the ascetic. This is the appearance in the ascetic’s field of
consciousness of an image related to one of the negative passions. This is the beginning of a
temptation. This image calls the ascetic to sin.
St Thomas himself refers to the appearance of such images, and, in agreement with Evagrius
Pontikos, considers that they are beyond conscious control, without however elaborating on
them. In the same place St Thomas also refers to movements of the sensitive appetite which
are due to the disposition of a bodily organ, also treating them as beyond conscious control.
[2] Evagrius Pontikos would agree that such movements exist. Elsewhere, St Thomas refers
to movements of members of the body under the control of the vegetative soul which are
beyond conscious control.[3] Evagrius Pontikos would also agree that these exist.

However, Evagrius Pontikos uses his psychological analysis of these images and their
inception, of these movements of the sensitive appetite due to the disposition of a bodily
organ and of these involuntary movements of members of the body due to the vegetative
soul, as a basis for the articulation of a program of ascesis which is directed against the
passions that are related to these involuntary images, to these involuntary movements of the
sensitive appetite and to these involuntary movements of the members of the body. The goal
in Evagrius’ system of ascesis is the attainment of ‘dispassion (apatheia)’, a freedom from
the passions related to these images, these involuntary movements of the sensitive appetite
and these involuntary movements of members of the body, and that as a preliminary to a
mystical ascent of gnosis, or contemplation, to God. Let us here restrict ourselves to the
ascetical struggle for dispassion (apatheia); we will later in this chapter discuss Evagrius’
theory of the mystical ascent of gnosis in relation to St Thomas’ psychology.

The ascetical psychology and ascetical program of Evagrius Pontikos address matters that St
Thomas in the Summa considers to be involuntary. However, these involuntary movements
are considered by Evagrius to be the beginning stages of what St Thomas is discussing in the
present article of the Summa: the modification by the emotions of the apprehension of the
good and of the end to be pursued.

When seen in the context of Evagrius’ psychology, St Thomas’ analysis is useful for a clearer
understanding of the passion and of its operation in human psychology; however, Evagrius
begins much earlier in the life cycle of the influence of the passion, or emotion, on the
behaviour of the ascetic than St Thomas does.

Let us elaborate.
A situation in which a hermit reached the stage of being overwhelmed by a passion so that
his reason were incapacitated would not only be very rare but also, in Evagrius’ view, a sign
of serious illness. For such a loss of the reason would be a very late stage in the life cycle of
the influence of a passion or emotion on the behaviour of the ascetic. Things are more subtle
in Evagrius’ psychology: an image appears in the mind’s eye of the ascetic; the ascetic, paying
attention as he goes through his day to his stream of consciousness,[4] notes the image and
rejects it. The image that has appeared in the mind’s eye of the ascetic is the initial stage of
the determination of the ascetic’s behaviour by the passion or emotion.

The ascetic occupies himself with the degree to which he allows the image to penetrate his
field of consciousness and to overwhelm him with thoughts concerning the content of the
image. Action to put the temptation into practice as sin is not unheard of, but it is far down
the line from the initial stages of temptation at which the hermit must habitually practise his
ascesis. A loss of one’s reason on account of such an image would as we said be a sign of a
serious disturbance.

The ascetic occupies himself with a typology of the images. This typology corresponds to a
typology of the passions. The ascetic can assess which passion is involved in the image, its
relative strength and so on. We will discuss this typology of the passions to a certain extent
when we look at St Thomas’ doctrine of the passions, below.

While in the ascetical psychology of Evagrius Pontikos there is an emphasis on the mind
(nous), and its role in governing the man, there is nothing of the rationalism of St Thomas.

Finally, the overt connection between Evagrius’ model of temptation and sin and St Thomas’
model of human action is this: In Evagrius’ model, the first stage of temptation is the
appearance of the image in the field of consciousness. The next stage is the dwelling of the
ascetic on thoughts concerning this image. The next stage is consent to the sin which was
portrayed by the initial image and which has formed the basis of the subsequent thoughts.
The next stage is deliberation ‘with the thought’ how to put the sin into practice.[5] The next
stage is action to put the sin into practice.[6]
Since consent to sin, deliberation over the means to practise the sin and action to put the sin
into practice are being discussed, implicitly there is a model here of human action. This
model lacks both the detail of St Thomas’ model of human action and its formal precision.
However, more importantly, in the ascetical model, the notion of consent is informal and
common-sense: none of the ascetical theorists listed belabours himself with the nature of the
will and with the nature of the act of consent: each takes it for granted that a man has free
will and that he can consent or refuse to do a thing. There is no sense at all of the will as a
hunger after the good and ultimately after the Beatific Vision, no Thomistic analysis of the
interplay of the intellect and will in the act of assent to the sin.

The treatment of deliberation is similarly cursory: deliberation is recognized to exist but

treated simply, in a common-sense way. There is no deep analysis of the relation between
intellect and will in the deliberation over the means and adoption of the means, no
discussion of enjoyment, consent, choice, intention and use.

The emphasis in the ascetical model is on the actual inception of the temptation as an image
in the ascetic’s field of consciousness. Here Evagrius, St Mark the Ascetic and St Hesychios
are very subtle, discussing aspects of the inception of the image and of the early stages of its
life cycle that St Thomas ignores.

To return to the relation between this ascetical model and St Thomas own model of human
action, Evagrius agrees with St Thomas that the inception of the image is involuntary.
However, the ascetic is expected to reject the initial image when it appears. To the degree
that the passion corresponding to the image is strong in the ascetic, this rejection is more or
less difficult for the ascetic to accomplish: it may be a struggle for him to prevent the image
from advancing to ‘much thought’, to use an expression of St Mark the Ascetic. However, the
battle of the hermit is precisely here, in rejecting this initial image, or, if the matter has
proceeded that far, in cutting off the ‘much thought’. This is the immaterial war of the
thoughts.

Hence, to the extent that the passion is strong in the man, that passion increases the
attractiveness of the image that has presented itself to his mind’s eye: the stronger the
passion is in the man, the more he wants to do what the image suggests, the more difficult it
is for him to reject the image, the more difficult it is for him to cut off the ‘much thought’ or,
if matters have proceeded that far, to refuse his consent to the sin and not to do it. But this is
precisely what St Thomas himself is addressing in the present article of the Summa. But the
two cases St Thomas presents are for the hermit in the Evagrian tradition at the extreme end
of the spectrum: in the one case, the passion is so strong that the reason is incapacitated and
the man acts like a brute animal with respect to the desire or anger; in the other case, the
matter has proceeded up to the stage of consent (in the Evagrian, not Thomist, sense) and
the passion more or less presses the man to consent although he retains to a greater or lesser
extent the use of his reason and will. Evagrius would agree that these cases exist, but as we
said, they are at the far end of the spectrum of possible cases, very late stages in the life cycle
of such an involuntary image.

Now the Evagrian ascetical program comprises not only the immaterial war of the thoughts,
the stages of which we have just outlined, but also ascetical methods to diminish the
passions, so that the battle progressively becomes easier, until such a time as the ascetic
attain to dispassion (apatheia).

The ascetical theorists consider that dispassion (apatheia) is not immunity from these
involuntary images but freedom from the pressure to follow them. However, they also
consider that the ascetical methods they recommend reduce the movements of the sensitive
appetite due to the disposition of a bodily organ and also radically transform the vegetative
soul so that the involuntary movements of the bodily members are themselves reduced or
eliminated, although not all of them.

What are these ascetical methods? They fit into two broad categories: bodily ascesis and
spiritual ascesis.

Bodily ascesis diminishes the passions of the body and hence directly reduces the intensity
and frequency of two of the involuntary movements that St Thomas has named: the
involuntary movements of the sensitive appetite due to the disposition of a bodily organ and
the involuntary movements of the bodily members due to movements of the vegetative
appetite—although not every involuntary movement of the bodily members is affected by
bodily ascesis.
Spiritual ascesis diminishes the passions of the soul and hence directly reduces the intensity
and frequency of the remaining involuntary movement: the determination by the passion
how the reason apprehends the good, or even the incapacitation by the passion of the reason
itself. Moreover, the images which initially appear in the mind’s eye of the ascetic become
less enticing; the ascetic is the more able to reject them at the instant of their inception.
However, since some images are related to bodily passions, a complete treatment of the
images requires both bodily and spiritual ascesis.

In the particular cases that St Thomas himself is addressing, both bodily ascesis and spiritual
ascesis are recommended by Evagrius. For the bodily ascesis diminishes the strength of the
bodily substrate which leads to an overwhelming by the passion of the reason and the will,
while the spiritual ascesis diminishes the strength of the passion of the sensitive appetite
insofar as it is to be found in the soul. This ascetical psychology and program of ascesis is
delineated by Evagrius Pontikos in the Treatise on the Practical Life.[7]

It is well to remark here on the relation between this program of ascesis and the fundamental
issue in cognitive psychology between the Philokalia and the psychology of St Thomas that
we will discuss below when we conduct a general assessment of St Thomas’ anthropology
and psychology: This program of ascesis deals with the inception of impassioned images in
the mind’s eye of the ascetic, and leads to a freedom or detachment from these images—their
appearance in the mind’s eye remaining in any event involuntary—, and also to a greater
freedom from passions of soul and body in the ways we have just described. But what the
ascetic lives subjectively is a progressive purification or emptying of his field of
consciousness, of his intellect, as habitually experienced by him. Now at the heart of this
ascetical method of Evagrius Pontikos is a doctrine of the divestiture of sense-perceptions
and recollections of sense-perceptions in order for the ascetic to attain to contemplation, to
intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities, something that St Thomas does not accept to
be naturally possible in this life. However, it is precisely through the practice of the method
of the immaterial war that we have just described, and through the practice of its attendant
methods of bodily and spiritual ascesis, that the ascetic is rendered able to divest himself of
these sense-perceptions and recollections of sense-perceptions, so as, with the grace of the
Holy Spirit, to enter into intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities, into contemplation.
The ascetic experiences this divestiture precisely at the level of the purification of his
habitual field of consciousness, precisely at level of his psychological apprehension of the
involuntary image that presents itself to his mind’s eye: as he progresses in the immaterial
war against these images, he is simultaneously progressing towards the possibility of
divesting himself of sense-perceptions and recollections of sense-perceptions so as to enter
into the contemplation of intelligible (i.e. non-sensible) realities.

The ascetical psychology of the school of Evagrius Pontikos which underlies the Philokalia
constitutes both an analysis of and a therapy for just those aspects of human action that St
Thomas is addressing in the present article of the Summa, and integrates that therapy into a
method for disposing the ascetic to enter into the contemplation of intelligible realities,
including God himself.

We will return to this matter below in our general discussion of the relation between the
Philokalia and the psychology of St Thomas Aquinas. However, let us now return to St
Thomas.

[4] We are using ordinary language here; in the later volumes, we will adopt more precise terminology.

[5] This stage is emphasized by St Hesychios, not by Evagrius.

[6] In the Skemmata (see Volume II), Evagrius introduces some refinements to the model just outlined.

Chapter IV -- 17

St Thomas establishes that God does not move the will necessarily.[1] That is, we are not
marionettes in the hands of Grace; Grace does not force us to do anything. The important
part of what St Thomas says is this:

Therefore, since the will is an active principle not determined to one thing but
having itself indifferently [disposed] to many things, God moves it thus, because
 it is not determined from necessity to one thing; but its movement remains
contingent and not necessary, except in those things to which it naturally moves.
[2]

St Thomas wishes to preserve human freedom in view of his doctrine that God is the only
external cause which can move the will. He does this by means of a doctrine which he has
taken from St Dionysios the Areopagite, that God acts on his creatures analogically with how
he has created them. Here, since the human will was created contingent and not necessary,
except in those things to which it naturally moves, notably the good and the Beatific Vision,
God moves the human will in the same way, preserving the contingency and non-necessity of
its movement, except in its desire for the good and for the Beatific Vision. St Thomas seems
to mean that God moves our will by attracting it towards the good and towards its final end,
beatitude.

St Thomas then turns to the concept of ‘enjoyment’.[3]

St Thomas establishes that enjoyment is an act of appetitive power.[4] St Thomas defines

enjoyment, quoting St Augustine as follows: ‘To enjoy is to adhere with Eros (amore) to
something on account of itself.’[5] He continues that enjoyment is of the end, and since the
end is a matter of the will, which is an appetitive power, enjoyment is an act of the appetitive
power.

St Thomas establishes that enjoyment has as its sole object the final end.[6] But in St
Thomas, the final end of man is beatitude, the Beatific Vision. We understand St Thomas to
say in this article that the only full and proper and complete enjoyment that a man can have
is of the Beatific Vision. However, St Thomas goes on to say, in the case of some other end, to
which certain other things are referred and which has in itself a certain delectation, the end
can in a certain way be said to be an object of enjoyment, but not properly and not according
to the complete nature of an object of enjoyment.

St Thomas establishes that, given its definition as adherence with Eros (amor) to something
on account of itself, enjoyment can occur even before possession of the object.[7] This is
clear: enjoyment is adherence with Eros to the object desired without the necessary
implication of its actually being possessed.

There is a certain ambiguity in St Thomas’ treatment of enjoyment. On the one hand,

enjoyment has its common-sense meaning. On the other hand, it is adherence to something
with Eros for the sake of the thing itself. This second sense of enjoyment is quite similar to
the psychoanalytic notion of ‘cathexis’, of the psychological bonding of the person to his love
object.

However, the Thomist notion that enjoyment has as its proper object only the final end,
beatitude, suggests that we cannot, according to the common-sense meaning of the term,
enjoy anything, or, in the broader sense of the term, adhere with Eros to any end for its own
sake, except the Beatific Vision, other than in an imperfect way.

But surely the bride and groom have each adhered with Eros to the other for the sake of the
other even before the two have come together. And surely the football fan adheres with
enjoyment to his favourite team and is grieved when it loses the Cup. And surely the political
partisan adheres with enjoyment to the party and agonizes when the struggle is on and the
issue in doubt. And surely the rock fan adheres with enjoyment to his favourite star and is
elated when his idol puts out a new song. Yes, says St Thomas, but these enjoyments are
improperly spoken of as enjoyment. But while it may be true that man’s final repose and
good is to rest in the lap of the Beloved, is not St Thomas’ notion of enjoyment too restricted?

Gilson discusses St Augustine’s distinction between ‘enjoyment’ and ‘use’.[8] This is

important for us, because St Thomas discusses ‘use’ below, clearly depending on St
Augustine for the concepts both of enjoyment and of use. As Gilson’s presents the matter, the
Augustinian distinction between enjoyment and use seems close to M. Buber’s (1878–1965)
notion of the distinction between the I-Thou and the I-It relationships: To enjoy something
is to fix the will on a thing with love for the sake of that thing only. To use something is to
make use of it as a means to obtain another end. Therefore one enjoys what he considers an
end; he uses what he does not consider except as a means. According to Gilson, St Augustine
goes on to say that, ultimately, we ought to enjoy only the final end, beatitude, or, indeed
God, making all things means to that end. However, St Augustine has put all this on the
psychological and moral plane, not on the plane of a metaphysical analysis of reality and of
the will. St Thomas Aquinas has reinterpreted the Augustinian doctrine within the context of
his Aristotelian metaphysics, changing the doctrine from a psychological and moral one to a
metaphysical doctrine of the nature of the will. Moreover, his metaphysical analysis is
carried out in the context of a strict rationalism. How well does St Augustine’s doctrine
survive such a treatment, however? It is as if today we were to express the Augustinian
doctrine by means of symbolic logic. The result would freeze the suppleness of St Augustine’s
analysis.

In artificial intelligence, enjoyment would seem to have to do with the degree of adherence
that the robot had to a goal, how easy it would be to deflect it to another goal according to
circumstances which developed after the adoption of the first goal. These levels of
commitment to a goal would have to be provided for in the design of the will subsystem.
They would be different from the different degrees of emotional intensity generated by the
desire and temper subsystems. However, the level of commitment by the will subsystem to a
goal would necessarily, by way of messages to them, affect the way the desire and temper
subsystems responded to the robot’s perceived context, just as, reciprocally, messages from
the desire and temper subsystems could affect the will and intellect (evidently, the robot
could become ‘conflicted’).

St Thomas next turns to ‘intention’.[9] Intention is distinguished from the simple act of the
will and from the goal of the will in that it is a conscious program or project—in ordinary
language, intention—to do some specific set of actions which comprise both the end and the
means to the end. For example, I want to become a monk. To be accepted into a monastery, I
must first pay off my school debts. I formulate an intention to go to the Middle East to work
at a high salary in the oil industry to pay off my school debts: I have applied for a job at such
and such a company; they have accepted me; I am waiting for my visa. This is my intention:
to go to the Middle East quickly to make a lot of money to pay off my school debts to become
a monk. This is my end: to become a monk.

St Thomas establishes that intention is an act of the will and not of the intellect.[10]

St Thomas establishes that our intention embraces both the end and the means to the end.
[11]
St Thomas next turns to ‘choice (electio)’.[12] Choice is the actual selection of the means to
the end. One way quickly to make a lot of money to pay off my school debts to become a
monk is to rob a bank. However, by ‘deliberation’,[13] I conclude that it would be better to go
to the Middle East. I choose going to the Middle East to work in the oil industry over robbing
a bank as the means to become a monk.

St Thomas establishes that choice is an act of the will and not of the reason. [14] While by
deliberation with my intellect I may conclude that it is better to go to the Middle East than to
rob a bank, choosing to go to the Middle East is an act of the will.

St Thomas establishes that choice has as its object the means to the end, not the end itself.
[15] Quoting Aristotle, he says: ‘The will is concerned with the end; choice, however, with
those things which are towards the end.’[16] In other words, my choice is not over whether to
become a monk or not—unless the problem be seen in a much broader context than how I
am now considering it, for example how I might obtain the Beatific Vision—but over the
means by which I might become a monk.

In artificial intelligence, the implications are obvious. Once the end is adopted, then after the
possible means to the end are found and evaluated, a means to the end is adopted—chosen—
by the will subsystem.

We will discuss certain aspects of St Thomas’ doctrine of choice when we discuss ‘consent’,
below.

St Thomas turns to ‘deliberation (consilio)’.[17] This is the act of the reason to evaluate the
possible means to the end.

St Thomas establishes that deliberation is a research.[18]

In artificial intelligence, this is important: the designer of the robot must introduce heuristic
programs into the intellect subsystem to search for possible means to the end. Here, given
that computer systems are always closed, discrete systems, the designer must provide for
‘vocabularies’ or databases of means that he will preprogram the robot to be able to execute.
The intellect subsystem must search its databases or repertoires of means to find an action,
or even a sequence of actions, which will, according to evaluation criteria that the designer
will have programmed, best ‘fit’ the end that the will subsystem will have adopted.

St Thomas establishes that deliberation has as its object only those things that are means to
the end.[19] Evaluating a possible goal is a different sort of thing from deliberating over the
possible means to attain that goal.[20]

St Thomas establishes that deliberation proceeds in an analytical fashion.[21]

In artificial intelligence, the designer would proceed in the way we have just described.[22]

St Thomas establishes that deliberation comes to an end somewhere.[23]

In artificial intelligence, this is important. The search and evaluation algorithms in the
intellect subsystem over the means must terminate, and within a reasonable time. Who
wants to buy a robot that can’t make up its mind?

St Thomas discusses the next stage of the human act, ‘consent’.[24]

St Thomas establishes that consent is an act of the appetitive power.[25] In establishing his
position, St Thomas quotes St John of Damascus. Here is what St Thomas says in the
contrary assertion:

But it is the contrary, as Damascene says in Book II, 22, [of the Exact Exposition
of the Orthodox Faith], that ‘If one judges and does not love (diligit), it is not
opinion (sententia),’ that is, consent (consensus). But to love (diligere) pertains
to the appetitive virtue. Hence, also consent.[26]

It is important to see what St John says in the Greek original:

 …Then he judges the better, and it is called judgement. Then he is disposed and
loves the thing judged from the counsel, and it is called opinion (gnome). For if
he judges and is not disposed towards the thing judged, that is to say, does not
love it, it is not called opinion (gnome).…[27]

We have italicized the sentence that St Thomas is quoting from the Latin translation of St
John.

It seems to us that St Thomas is forcing St John of Damascus.

St Thomas’ use of St John of Damascus must be understood in the context of St Thomas’

definition of consent: the assent of the will to the good in each of the possible means to the
end that the intellect discovers in its act of deliberation over the means to the end. What St
John seems to have in mind, however, is the interior adherence to our judgement that we
have when we adopt an opinion. While adopting an opinion is not far from assenting to the
good in a set of possible means, it is not the same thing.

We wonder whether the problem is not this: in the passage of the Exposition that St Thomas
obviously has before him, is not St John discussing and defining a loose and overlapping set
of concepts, whereas St Thomas is taking him to describe what he himself wants to describe,
a rigorously formal model of human action such as we might find today in symbolic logic?
Moreover, as will be seen from a consideration of the full passage of St John, the ‘opinion
(gnome)’ that St Thomas has assimilated to ‘consent (consensus)’ seems more to apply to the
judgement that the end is good, not the means to the end. St Thomas seems to have been
misled by the fact that St John refers to an examination of means before referring to the
formation of the ‘opinion (gnome)’. However, the full passage indicates that when St John
discusses the formation of the ‘opinion (gnome)’, he has returned to a discussion of the
evaluation of the end.

The full passage of St John is this:

It is necessary to know that there is naturally sown in the soul an appetitive power (dunamis) desirous
(orektike) of that being which is according to nature, which power embraces all those properties which
are in [that being’s] nature essentially. This power is called the will (thelesis). For the essence of being
 and living and moving, when it aspires, desires, in accordance with the mind (nous) and the perception
(aisthesis), its own natural and full being. For that reason they also define the natural will thus: The will
is a rational and living appetite depending only on natural things. Therefore the will is that natural and
rational appetite, or simple power; for the appetite of the irrational animals, not being rational, is not
called will.

Purpose (boulesis), then, is a certain natural will (thelesis), that is to say, natural and rational appetite
(orexis), for some thing. For there lies in the soul of man a power rationally to desire (oregesthai).
When, then, that rational appetite moves (kineitai) towards a certain thing, it is called purpose
(boulesis). For purpose (boulesis) is a rational appetite and aspiration for a certain thing.

Purpose (boulesis) is named both concerning those things that are in our power and concerning those
things that are not in our power, that is, both concerning those things that are possible and concerning
those things that are impossible. For we often purpose to commit fornication or to be chaste or to sleep
or one of those sorts of things, and these things are those which are in our power and possible. We also
purpose to reign as king; this is not one of the things that are in our power. Perhaps we also purpose
never to die; this is one of the things that are impossible.

There is, then, the purpose (boulesis) of the end or of those things which are towards the end. On the
one hand, then, that which is willed is the end, as to reign as king, as to be in good health; on the other
hand, there is the matter for deliberation towards the end, that is to say, the means through which we
must be in good health or reign as king. Then, after the purpose (boulesis), search and thought. And
after that, if the matter is one of those things which is in our power, there occurs counsel (boule), that is
to say deliberation (bouleusis). Counsel (boule), then, is a searching appetite that occurs concerning
those things which are in our power to be done. For he deliberates if he must pursue the thing or not.
Then he judges the better, and it is called judgement. Then he is disposed and loves the thing judged
from the counsel, and it is called opinion (gnome). For if he judges and is not disposed towards the thing
judged, that is to say, does not love it, it is not called opinion (gnome). Then after the disposition there
occurs intention (proairesis), which is to say, choice (epiloge); for intention (proairesis) is to choose
and select this in preference to that in regard to two things which lie before us. Then he rushes towards
the act, and it is called impulse. Afterwards he uses, and it is called use. Then after the use he ceases

from the appetite.[28]

Although there are obvious connections and similarities between St John and St Thomas
here, St John is not so rationalistic and rigorously formally logical as St Thomas. Moreover,
the doctrine of consent that St Thomas is advancing can only with a certain forcing be
derived from this passage of St John.
Let us make some remarks on this admittedly somewhat obscure passage of St John. First, St
John does, evidently following Aristotle, define the will, with St Thomas, as a rational
appetite. However, in St John, the will is an appetite ‘desirous (orektike) of that being which
is according to nature’, and it ‘embraces all those properties which are in [that being’s]
nature essentially’: we take this to refer to the (well-) being of the soul itself: ‘For the essence
of being and living and moving, when it aspires, desires, in accordance with the mind (nous)
and the perception (aisthesis), its own natural and full being.’ We see nothing here of St
Thomas’ doctrine that the will tends necessarily to the Beatific Vision, and to secondary
goods only insofar as they bear a metaphysical relation of goodness to the Beatific Vision.
While such a doctrine might on the basis of Aristotelian metaphysics be inferable from what
St John says, St John has here made no such inference. The doctrine of St Thomas is his own
Aristotelian adaptation of the related doctrine of St Augustine. St John has a more flexible
and open doctrine of the will than St Thomas: while the soul certainly finds ‘its own natural
and full being’ in perfection in the gnosis of God himself, St John’s doctrine is more supple as
a doctrine of human psychology than St Thomas’ doctrine.

We next see St John’s definition of purpose (boulesis): it is ‘a rational appetite and aspiration
for a certain thing’: we take this to be the end or the means towards the end: ‘There is, then,
the purpose (boulesis) of the end or of those things which are towards the end.’ St John
continues with a passage that seems to mix discussion of evaluation of the end with
discussion of evaluation of the means to the end. For after purpose (boulesis), he names
‘search and thought’, seemingly passing from the end to the means to the end. He then
passes to counsel (boule). St Thomas has adopted counsel (boule) as deliberation (consilio),
but taken as search and thought only over the means to the end, at least insofar as a formal
stage of his theory of action is concerned: that appears to be how St Thomas has taken
‘concerning those things which are in our power to be done’—as being concerned only with
the possible means to the end. However, when St John then says, ‘For he deliberates if he
must pursue the thing or not,’ is he not then discussing deliberation over the suitability of
the end, something that St Thomas himself recognizes?[29] If that is so, as we think, then
‘the better’ that the man judges ‘concerning those things which are in our power to be done’
is not the best means to the end, but which end the man should pursue, or even whether he
should pursue an end at all, although St John is not being so rigorously formally precise that
deliberation over the means can be excluded. However, if our interpretation be correct, then
St John goes on to say that the man is positively disposed towards the end judged best from
the counsel and loves that end, and that this is called ‘opinion’. This ‘opinion’ is not a matter
of consent to the means, taken as adherence of the will to the good in each and every possible
means to the end, as St Thomas would have it, but of the formation of and adherence to an
actual opinion that that end is what the man actually ought to do. St John then proceeds to
intention, which is a choice of one thing over another. While this certainly is consistent with
choosing one means to an end over another, we wonder if St John is not still discussing the
choice of one end over another.

If we take St John to be talking about the end when he discusses the formation of the opinion
(gnome), is not the positive disposition and love of the man for ‘the thing judged from the
counsel’ to be ‘the better’, the enjoyment of the end that St Thomas himself refers to, that
psychological bonding to the love object that we spoke of that occurs even before the end is
attained?[30] In that case, there would be no support for St Thomas’ use of the passage in his
definition of consent as the assent of the will to the good in each of the possible means to an
end that the intellect discovers in its act of deliberation.

Let us continue with St Thomas: St Thomas establishes that consent is only towards those
things that are means to the end, not towards the end itself.[31]

In St Thomas, what is the difference between enjoyment and consent? For in St Thomas’
doctrine, consent appears to be a mild version of enjoyment. In St Thomas, enjoyment
relates to the end, and especially to the final end, beatitude, whereas consent relates to the
good in all possible means to attain a certain contingent end. Gilson points out that we make
an act of the will, called consent, that assents to the good in each of the possible means that
we encounter in our intellect’s deliberation over the means to the end, making it necessary
for us to make another act of the will, choice, before we can proceed to action.[32] This
agrees with certain of St Thomas’ remarks to which Gilson refers.[33]

Surely, however, given that St John of Damascus has defined opinion (gnome) as arising
from the judgement of ‘the better’, St Thomas’ definition of consent is a forced
interpretation. It seems to us that St Thomas is here trying to fit the loose and overlapping
set of concepts of St John into a rigorously formal model of human action that has no
untidiness. But that leads him to rationalistic excess. For we consent to the best means, not
to the good in every possible means that we discover by deliberation: who makes an overt act
of the will consenting to the good in every possible means that he discovers by an act of
deliberation of his intellect, an overt act of the will different from the actual choice of the
means that he actually will pursue?

However, in artificial intelligence, the designer of a robot should proceed in the way St
Thomas has outlined: he should use heuristic programs in the intellect subsystem to find all
the possible means to the end; he should ‘score’ each means on the basis of preprogrammed
criteria—this would be an assessment by the intellect subsystem of the good in each possible
means—; and he should have the intellect subsystem send to the will subsystem for its
consent a message which lists all the possible means with their ‘scores’. Then it is a matter of
the robot’s choosing the best means to the end.

St Thomas seems to say that it is not the intellect which determines which means will be
adopted at the stage of choice, but the will.[34] For, St Thomas says, once the intellect has
deliberated over all the means and the will has consented to the good in each of the possible
means, then the will chooses the means. But there is no provision in St Thomas’ theory for
the will to deliberate over anything. This seems to imply that the will makes an ‘existential
leap’ in choosing one of the possible means, but that seems uncharacteristic of St Thomas:
surely the reason commands the will which means to adopt by providing the will with its
choice. St Thomas does, however, introduce the notion of residual influences of the will on
the intellect and of the intellect on the will, evidently in order to address this issue.[35]

It seems to us that the weakness of St Thomas’ model of human action is in its treatment of
the freedom of man and that this weakness is manifest in the above considerations.

In artificial intelligence, the designer should have the will subsystem necessarily choose the
means with the highest ‘score’: it would not make sense for the will subsystem to override the
ranking of the means provided by the intellect subsystem: that would introduce other criteria
into the ranking.

St Thomas turns to the final stage of the human act, ‘use (usus)’.[36] In discussing
enjoyment, above, we have already seen that St Augustine defines ‘use’ as a sort of I-It
relationship in contradistinction to the I-Thou relationship of ‘enjoyment’. St Thomas’ ‘use’
is just what we would understand today by ‘use’: the use we make of something, especially of
the bodily members, to bring about the goal through the means we have chosen.

St Thomas establishes that use is an act of the will.[37] It is the will that makes use of the
bodily members, not the intellect.

In artificial intelligence, we have already seen this: the will is the executive subsystem. It is
the will subsystem that will put the other subsystems—including the intellect subsystem—
and the physical members of the robot’s body into action in order to accomplish the means
to the end.

St Thomas next discusses the last aspect of the human action, ‘command’.[38] There are two
aspects of command: the actual act of command and the act commanded. The act of
command is the issuance of the order; the act commanded is what the order says should be
done. Here we understand that ‘command’ is taken by St Thomas to refer to how the powers
of the soul and the members of the body are put into motion in order for the means to the
end to be accomplished. Although his remarks can certainly be read in a broader light—for
example, as bearing on how the intellect comes to present the will with its end—the
placement of the discussion of ‘command’ in his exposition and the general structure of his
theory of action seem to restrict the notion of command to the actual accomplishment of
means.

St Thomas establishes that command is an act of the reason, an act of the will being
presupposed. St Thomas writes these important but difficult lines on the subject:[39]

To command is an act of the reason, there being supposed, however, an act of the will. Towards the
proof of this it is necessary to consider that since acts of the will and of the reason can act on each other
reciprocally, as, that is to say, the reason reasons concerning what is to be willed, and the will wills to
reason, it occurs that an act of the will comes from an act of the reason and conversely. And since the
virtue (virtus) of the prior act remains in the act which follows, it sometimes happens that there is a
certain act of the will according to which there remains in it by virtue something of an act of the reason,
as has been said concerning ‘use’ and ‘choice’; and, conversely, a certain act of the reason, according to
which there remains in it by virtue something of an act of the will. However, to command is essentially
an act of the reason; for, commanding, it orders, by intimating or declaring, the [power] that it orders, to
do something: however, it is [the nature] of the reason thus to command [a power] after the fashion of
this intimation. But the reason can intimate or declare something in two ways: In one way absolutely,
 and here the intimation is expressed by a verb in the indicative mood, as if one were to say to another:
‘This is to be done by you.’ However, at another time, the reason intimates something to someone by
moving him to it; and this sort of intimation is expressed by a verb in the imperative mood, for example

when it is said to someone: ‘Do this!’ However, as has been said, [40] among the powers of the soul, the
first mover to the exercise of an act is the will. Therefore, since the second mover does not move except
in virtue of the first mover, it follows that that itself which the reason moves by commanding should be
in it out of the virtue of the will. Whence it remains that to command is an act of the reason, there being
presupposed an act of the will, in virtue of which the reason moves [a power] to the exercise of the act by
means of command.

The gist of this passage is that it is the intellect which tells the will what to do. However, the
intellect must first have been put into motion by the will, since it is the will which must move
the other powers of the soul to act. St Thomas seems to be running the risk of an infinite
regress here, since it is the intellect that presents to the will its object. Where does the cycle
start?

In artificial intelligence, the implications are clear.

St Thomas’ doctrine of the reciprocal interactions of the intellect and the will creates serious
conceptual problems for his model that are evident in this article. For he wants to say that to
command is the sort of thing that applies to the reason, that it is an intellectual sort of thing.
However, as he puts it, ‘[A]mong the powers of the soul the first mover to the exercise of an
act is the will.’ To resolve this contradiction, he must introduce a doctrine of residual
influences: When the reason commands the will, because command is the sort of thing that
the reason and not the will does, it does so because the will has first moved the reason to act
and that act of the will has left a residue in the reason. However, when the will ‘chooses’ or
‘uses’, because choosing or using is the sort of thing that the will and not the reason does, it
does so because the reason has deliberated over the means to the end, and that act of the
reason has left a residue in the will. This last appears to be how St Thomas handles the
objection that the act of the will in choosing the means appears to be an ‘existential leap’
since in his system there is no provision for the will to deliberate: he says that in the act of
the will’s choosing there remains a residue of the reason’s deliberation over the means.
Surely this logical complexity demonstrates the weakness of St Thomas’ model: in his effort
to produce a logically rigorous model of human action he has got himself into serious logical
difficulties which require the supposition of residual influences of one power of the soul on
the other. While in the context of his Aristotelian metaphysics, his solutions may be precise
and well-taken, surely because of this logical complexity his model fails as a model of human
psychology! For while on the philosophical plane we may agree with his theoretical solutions,
do they have anything to do with the lived experience of ordinary men?

In artificial intelligence, St Thomas’ remarks in this article are well-taken. The designer
should consider what St Thomas is saying.

St Thomas next establishes that to command precedes use.[41] This is simply the common-
sense notion that we command the use of a bodily member before we put it to use. We
obviously do not command the use of our bodily members after they have been put to use.
The model here is the soldier who obeys the command of the general: he does not obey
before the general commands but after.

St Thomas establishes that the command and the act commanded are one and the same
thing.[42] That is, when I command my bodily members, and this is taken to be a human act,
the command—to raise my arm, say—and the act commanded—the raising of my arm—are
one and the same thing. That is, there is no gap between the command and the act
commanded: taken as a human act; they are one and the same thing: I raise my arm.
However, according to St Thomas, this unitary human act can be analysed into parts and I
can logically distinguish between the command of reason—that my arm be raised—and the
actual act commanded—the raising of my arm.

St Thomas next establishes that an act of the will can be commanded. St Thomas says this:

As has been said,[43] command is nothing else than an act of the reason with a certain motion
ordering (ordinantis) [a power] in regard to something that is to be done. However, it is manifest that
the reason can order (ordinare) concerning the act of the will; for just as it can judge that it would be
good to will something, thus it can order, by commanding, that the man will: from which it follows that

an act of the will can be commanded.[44]

In artificial intelligence, this raises the interesting problem of those cases in which the
intellect subsystem commands the will subsystem to will something, evidently on the basis of
a prior command of the will subsystem to the intellect subsystem to evaluate some matter.

St Thomas establishes that acts of the reason can be commanded.[45] He says this:

Since the reason reflects on itself, as ordering concerning the acts of the other powers, thus can it even

order concerning its own act: whence even its own act can be commanded. [46]

St Thomas has some provisoes concerning whether the reason can command the
comprehension or assent of the reason itself.

The significance of this passage, which is important, is that in St Thomas’ doctrine, it is the
will which ‘makes things happen’, but it is the intellect which commands the will ‘what it
should make happen’. Hence, in St Thomas’ doctrine, the reason can give a command to the
will to put the reason itself into operation: I conclude by reason that a good means to
progress spiritually would be to think about my salvation and my reason commands my will
to put my reason into operation to think about my salvation. As a matter of logical analysis
for the designer of a robot, this is, honestly, very valuable advice. But as a matter of human
psychology, has not St Thomas been carried away by his rationalistic and intellectualistic
effort at formal logical precision?

In artificial intelligence, the implication is that the intellect subsystem can command the will
subsystem to direct itself, the intellect subsystem, to conduct certain evaluations or
calculations. The designer will have to be careful to avoid an endless regression or ‘loop’ in
such interactions between the two subsystems.

St Thomas next establishes that the act of the sensitive appetite can be commanded, but not
insofar, first, as it rests on the disposition of a bodily organ nor insofar, second, as the
movement suddenly tends independently of the reason towards the apprehension of the
imagination or sense.[47]
In the first case, the key to St Thomas’ argument is that the powers of the soul other than the
reason and the will depend on the body to a greater or lesser extent. To the extent that a
movement of the sensitive appetite depends on a movement of the (sensitive) soul, it can be
commanded; to the extent, however, that it depends on a movement of the body, it cannot.

In the second case, St Thomas does not explain why a sudden movement of sensitive appetite
towards an apprehension of the imagination or sense is outside the control of our reason. He
seems to accept the matter as a common fact of life, and observes that if the reason were able
to control such a movement, then it would be able to prevent it, something that he considers
impossible.

This second case is very important for us, for these sudden movements of the sensitive
appetite towards imagination or sense are the basis of the ascetical model of temptation and
sin of Evagrius Pontikos, St Mark the Ascetic and St Hesychios that we discussed earlier.[48]
For the ascetical program that leads to dispassion (apatheia)—a concept surely foreign to St
Thomas—is centred precisely on these sudden movements of the imagination and sense.
These are the initial images that we spoke of that occur in the mind’s eye of the ascetic.

Moreover, the first case, the movements of the sensitive appetite which depend on a
disposition of a bodily organ, is in the ascetical theory of Evagrius Pontikos the object of a
bodily ascesis for the diminution of the bodily passions.

In artificial intelligence, the implication is that within certain limits, the intellect subsystem
must be able to send instructions to the will to ‘reset’ the desire and temper subsystems—to
calm them down, for example, or even to make them a little more excited so that they take
things a little more seriously.

St Thomas next establishes that the acts of the vegetative soul are not subject to the
command of reason.[49] His reasoning is that the acts of the vegetative soul are not
apprehended (i.e. not consciously perceived), and, since the reason operates by means of the
power of perception, it is impossible that it should be able to control them.
However, in the ascetical program of Evagrius, these involuntary movements of the
vegetative soul, which always have a bodily substrate, are the object of a bodily ascesis,
although not entirely.

In artificial intelligence, the implication is that it would not do for the intellect subsystem to
tell the vegetative subsystem not to say to the desire subsystem that the battery is low: when
the battery is low, it’s low.

St Thomas establishes that the acts of certain bodily members such as the hands can be
commanded, whereas the acts of certain other bodily members cannot.[50] He says this:

The members of the body are certain organs of the powers of the soul: whence, in that manner by which
the powers of the soul are obedient to the reason, in that same manner the members of the body are
also. Therefore, since the powers of the sensitive soul are subject to the command of reason, not,
however, the natural [vegetative] powers, on account of this, all the movements of the members which
are moved by the sensitive power of the soul are subject to the power of the reason; however, the
movements of the members which follow the natural [vegetative] powers are not subject to the

command of reason.[51]

What is St Thomas saying? All the bodily members are organs of one or another power of the
soul. Since each member of the body is the organ of a certain power of the soul, it is subject
to the conscious control of the reason precisely to the extent that the corresponding power of
the soul is subject to the conscious control of the reason. The two types of powers that St
Thomas considers are the vegetative and the sensitive. As we have already seen, the
vegetative powers of the soul—this is the realm of biochemical reactions, endocrine
reactions, reactions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, in a word, of
involuntary bodily responses—are not under the conscious control of the reason. Hence, St
Thomas says, the bodily members controlled by the vegetative powers of the soul are not
subject to conscious control. This is clear: there are many bodily reactions that are
involuntary.

However, the sensitive powers of the soul are subject to conscious control by the reason.
Therefore the bodily members controlled by the sensitive powers of the soul are subject to
conscious control by the reason. However, it is well to recall that an overwhelming by a
passion, which overwhelming has a bodily substrate, can incapacitate the reason.

It is well to note in passing that St Thomas here ignores those cases where a member of the
body is partly under the control of the vegetative soul and partly under the control of the
sensitive soul. Some members of the body are immune from conscious control under some
aspects and subject to conscious control under other aspects. This, however, does not present
any serious difficulty for St Thomas’ analysis, being a mere detail.

In artificial intelligence, the implication is that it would not do for the intellect subsystem to
meddle with the support circuitry of the vegetative subsystem. That should be handled
directly from within the vegetative subsystem, leaving the intellect subsystem to its work of
evaluating ends, evaluating means, and logical and arithmetic computation.

In the ascetical program of Evagrius Pontikos which underlies the Philokalia, the involuntary
movements of the bodily members due to the vegetative soul are the object of bodily ascesis.

[20] However, see our remarks under St Ia IIae, 10, 2, above, concerning deliberation over the end.

Chapter IV -- 18

Let us now summarize St Thomas model of human action. The two powers of the human soul
which are chiefly involved in the determination and execution of a human action are the
reason and the will. The reason is the highest part of man, limited to propositional
knowledge generated through ratiocination working with propositions based on concepts
abstracted from the data of sense-perception and on intuitions of first principles such as the
law of the excluded middle. The will is a rational hunger after the good, first after the Beatific
Vision and secondarily after particular goods other than the Beatific Vision. The reason
presents to the will its end. This itself follows deliberation by the reason whether the end is
worthy of pursuit. Having received its end from the reason, the will adopts this end and
adheres to it with enjoyment even before it has attained it. The will then moves the reason to
deliberate in an investigative, analytical way over the possible means to accomplish the end.
The will then consents to the good in each of the possible means that the intellect discovers
by this act of deliberation. The will then chooses the means—we think, by the command of
the reason which determines which means to choose, or at least by the residual influence on
the will of the reason’s act of deliberation—thus forming an intention which comprises both
the end and the means to the end. The reason then commands the will so that the will use the
bodily members, or the other powers of the soul, even the reason, to accomplish the means
to the end in accordance with the intention.

In artificial intelligence, St Thomas has provided the researcher with an algorithm which
describes the determination and execution of an action by a robot. He has already also given
his reader a considerable measure of advice on how to organize the robot.

The reader might think that we presented this excursion into artificial intelligence with our
tongue in cheek. No. We think that a researcher into artificial intelligence would profit
greatly by studying St Thomas’ theory of human action. Moreover, the design specifications
for a robot are nothing more or less than a formal model of human action, which essentially
is what St Thomas has set out to provide. And ‘writing out’ the design specifications of a
robot, or even building the robot, are a test not only of our understanding of the formal
model of human action, but also of the consistency and completeness of the formal model
itself. For we see that in St Thomas’ model of human action there is a problem with the
reciprocal interdependence of the intellect and the will: how things get started. Of course, we
ourselves are reserved whether such formal models do justice to the reality of human
psychology, especially mystical psychology. However, despite the ambiguities and difficulties
that his model does have, St Thomas has provided his reader with a very detailed formal
model of how it is that humans come to determine and to do a human action.

While we did not present our excursion into artificial intelligence with tongue in cheek, we
think, quite soberly, that it can be construed to be the reductio ad absurdum of St Thomas’
approach. St Thomas’ training in logic has led him to construct a model of human psychology
that is, as they say in mathematics, very ‘tight’: formally precise, rigorously logical, without
gaps or loopholes, logically consistent and complete. These logical requirements on a model
are precisely what is needed by the researcher into artificial intelligence so that he can use
the model to design a robot that actually works, but we have strong reservations whether
such a robot more than mimics human behaviour, and, moreover, we have very strong
reservations about the validity in human psychology of this rationalistic aspect of St Thomas’
psychology. While studying St Thomas forces you to think about the issues and to clarify
your own thinking about human action, surely human psychology is not a matter of such
rigorously formal logical models. In this St Augustine was by far the better psychologist.

Earlier in this work, in Chapter I, we remarked that one problem with the use of algorithms
to represent the human mind (nous) was whether a priori the researcher limited the powers
of the mind (nous) to those which easily fit the theory of algorithms. While St Thomas surely
knew nothing about algorithms, which in any event are simply mechanical procedures, we
find this problem even in his own work. For from the beginning, following Aristotle, whom
we doubt was as rationalistic as his disciple, St Thomas, St Thomas has restricted human
actions to those which are constituted both of a determinate end, over which the man has
rationally deliberated and which he has consciously adopted, and of the determinate means
to the end, over which the man has rationally deliberated and which he has consciously
chosen. Other actions of a man are not human actions. A spontaneous act of love, of charity
or of compassion is not a human action.

A. Donagan, in his article, ‘Thomas Aquinas on human action’, Chapter 33 of The Cambridge
History of Later Medieval Philosophy, writes as follows:

As for the scarcely less common objection that the elicited acts which according to Aquinas are
components of even the simplest complete human acts are too numerous to be credible, and correspond
to nothing in our experience of our own acts, the reply—made by action theorists today—must be that
the components of simple human acts are ascertained, not by introspecting what happens when we

perform them, but by examining various cases in which the act is begun but not completed.… [1]

We challenge this.

Implicit in the method that Donagan is espousing of examining interrupted actions is the
notion that there is an underlying procedure for coming to do human actions that the human
mind follows, the steps of which can be elucidated by considering cases of interrupted
actions. Were we to consider a multitude of interrupted actions, it seems, we would be able
to discover all the detailed steps of the underlying procedure of coming to do a human
action. That would be true if the mind of man worked by algorithms. But that is precisely
what is in question. It is an a priori assumption—perhaps even unspoken and unconscious—
on the part of the action theorist.

Let us clarify the connection between human actions and algorithms.

First let us remark that ‘procedure’, ‘mechanical procedure’ and ‘algorithm’ are synonymous.

There are two levels at which a human action can be seen or described in terms of
algorithms. The first is the actual process of coming to settle on and to do a human action: St
Thomas has provided us with an algorithm that we ourselves have just outlined above:
consideration of a possible end, adoption of the end, enjoyment of the end, deliberation over
the possible means to the end, consent to the good in all the possible means, choice of the
means, intention, command and use. This is human action seen from the point of view of a
fixed procedure that humans supposedly follow in deciding upon and doing a human action.
Donagan himself has a chart, which clearly manifests, at the level we are discussing, the
algorithmic structure of the Thomist model of human action, as Donagan understands it
surely.[2]

There is another level at which human action can be seen as an algorithm or mechanical
procedure. This is the level of the actual concrete actions that a man comes to do as a result
of following the procedure, for which St Thomas has provided the model, of coming to settle
on and to do a human action. That is, once I adopt the end and the means to the end, I come
to do a sequence of actual, concrete actions. This sequence of actions can also itself be seen
as an algorithm. Although we doubt that Donagan was familiar with the theory of algorithms,
his section ‘Complete acts and component acts’ strongly hints, although probably
inadvertently, at this level of algorithmic analysis. For he says:

Hence many human acts must be complex, in the sense of having other complete
human acts as components. … But what may be called organised acts, consisting
in a certain number of different complete human acts, the performance of which
in a certain temporal order … is designed to bring about a certain result, are
more common and more important. Making a cake and tying a complicated knot
are homely examples.[3]
But baking a cake—following a recipe—is the classic example of an algorithm.

In discussing the applicability of the concept of algorithm to human action, there are
therefore two levels at which the matter must be approached. Let us start with the second
level, that of a discrete sequence of actions such as following a recipe to bake a cake. It is true
that men often perform such discrete sequences of actions. It is often true that they do so
when they are learning a complex action, especially one involving the body: learning to dance
and learning to practise the martial arts are examples of the sort of training where one
blindly—mechanically—follows a discrete sequence of steps repetitively until one has learned
them.

However, when the man has learned the sequence of steps, and the music starts, or the fight
is on, is he still following a mechanical procedure, an algorithm? No. This is a matter of
human psychology, one that only someone who has learned to dance or learned to practise
the martial arts can grasp. Imposing the view that the man has internalized a mechanical
procedure or algorithm, so that he practises it ‘automatically’ or ‘by memory’ is the a priori
imposition of an algorithmic model on what actually happens psychologically when one
learns to dance or to practise the martial arts—or indeed to do any of a multitude of other
such actions, even cognitive, such as playing chess. The logical analysis of a sequence of
actions that the man does is not equivalent to an analysis of how the man learns the
sequence of actions psychologically and even repeats them once he has thoroughly learned
them. More is involved: concentration, attention, psychological bonding to the environment,
a sense of rhythm (even in the martial arts), non-verbal communication with the partner or
opponent (even in a genuine fight), understanding (there is even a non-rational conscious
understanding of the body and its movements). A champion in the martial arts once
remarked to us that fighting a match was something between Baryshnikov (the great Russian
ballet-dancer) and Muhammad Ali (the great American boxer). Surely this is more than a
matter of an internalized mechanical procedure. Moreover, the logical analysis of a complex
action—which can even produce a sequence of simple actions that the man should do; this is
the domain of industrial engineering—can bewitch us that we have uncovered the
psychological structure of performing a complex action. But this is an unwarranted
assumption. It has not to be proved so much as to be recognized as an assumption that
determines our understanding of what it means for us to do a complex action.
It is as we said in Chapter I with the chess master: it is not that his mind is a better computer
than the minds of all his opponents, so that it looks ahead more moves than the minds of his
opponents, but that the chess master understands the chess game better than his opponents.

It is the same with the martial arts champion: his mind is not a faster computer, his body a
better robot, than the minds and bodies of his opponents: he has not internalized a program
for unarmed combat that he exercises with greater accuracy and rapidity than all his
opponents. He has certainly been trained in the martial arts, but he is also more alert, more
attentive, more understanding than his opponents. A Japanese karate master once remarked
in our presence concerning an old karate master: ‘He is slow but he beats all his opponents.’

The situation is much the same in the case of the first level, that of the sort of procedure that
St Thomas describes in his theory of action for coming to settle on and to do a human action.
As we have pointed out, St Thomas’ model of such a decision process is algorithmic even
though he most likely did not realize it. One can conduct a logical analysis, based on certain
concepts, of how it is that a man comes to settle on and to do a human action. And Donagan
has asserted that cases in which the decision process is interrupted can elucidate the
structure of the decision process. However, the argument is circular. If the process of coming
to settle on and to do a human action is algorithmic in nature, then examining cases of
interrupted actions is a valid means to uncover the structure of that algorithm. But that is an
assumption, not a fact. For if the human mind works differently from an algorithm,
examining cases of interrupted processes of coming to settle on and to do a human act with a
view to elucidating the structure of the algorithm will only bewitch us that we have
uncovered the inner, algorithmic structure of the human mind. Moreover, since such an
elucidation can proceed arbitrarily closely—at the cost of greater and greater logical
complexity, surely—to describing the supposed way in which the human mind works, such
an approach becomes an argument that the human mind does indeed work by algorithms.

What is in issue is the nature of the human mind, what it means to be a man alive.

The danger is that a priori we will exclude from consideration aspects of the human
mind that do not easily fit into an algorithmic model of how it is that humans come to settle
on and to do a human action. We have already seen this in St Thomas’ rejection of most
intuitive faculties of human cognition and in his limitation of human actions to those actions
which are done for a rationally determined end over which the mind has rationally
deliberated, which end is attained by the rational selection and execution of means.

Being alive and being human are not matters of algorithms.

The difference is that a man is a person. It is precisely in the consideration of the humanly
free person in the context of St Thomas’ theory of the reciprocal interactions of the will and
of the intellect in a man’s coming to settle on and do a human action that we see the
fundamental problem in St Thomas’ approach. His approach is forced to treat the will and
the intellect as so to speak separate ‘sub-persons’ subject to Aristotelian causal analysis,
which ‘sub-persons’ together constitute the human person: there is no way to pass from such
a causal analysis of the reciprocal relations of discrete faculties of the human soul to the
rationally free human person taken as a whole in himself, as an actor, as an agent—as a
person. It is precisely here that the difficulties in the reciprocal interactions of the will and
the intellect arise which lead St Thomas to posit the residual influence of the one faculty on
the other. Since a robot is a machine, it can easily be designed to have separate, independent,
discrete subsystems. Such a machine can then mimic a man’s behaviour. There is no
question of a unitary consciousness in a robot; no question of a mind (nous), no question of a
person, in such a machine. Hence, St Thomas’ analysis is useful for the researcher into
artificial intelligence. However, to the extent that the human person is a ‘singularity’, an
image of God, and not the mere composite of separate, independent, discrete faculties of the
human soul subject to Aristotelian causal analysis, which faculties together produce the
behaviour we call human, then the human person cannot be decomposed into the reciprocal
interactions of the will and the intellect. It might be objected that St Thomas emphasizes the
unity of the human soul. But, as we have seen, St Thomas’ analysis of human action proceeds
on the basis of handling the faculties of the human soul as separate logical entities subject to
Aristotelian causal analysis.

We can see in St Thomas’ treatment of human action not only his rationalism, but also his
naturalism. We find it hard to convey this naturalism with the same precision with which we
have just conveyed St Thomas’ rationalism. However, this naturalism of St Thomas is just as
important as his rationalism, not only for an understanding of his system taken in and of
itself, but also for an understanding of the temper of Roman Catholicism. For we do not
doubt that it as Fr McBrien says in the quotation from Catholicism with which we began this
chapter: ‘No theologian in the entire history of the [Roman Catholic] Church has had such a
decisive impact on Catholic thought and the shaping of the Catholic tradition as St Thomas
Aquinas.’

This naturalism finds its expression in the emphasis on the naturalness of the passions when
they are subject to the control of reason. We will see this just below when we discuss St
Thomas’ doctrine of the passions.

This naturalism also finds its expression in the doctrine of natural law that St Thomas
advances in the Summa, although that doctrine is largely beyond the scope of this work. As
one might expect, the natural law is equated by St Thomas with conformance to reason;
however, there is a very great emphasis in St Thomas’ doctrine of the natural law on the
natural impulses of man, more so than in the ascetical tradition of the East that arose with
the Egyptian Fathers. St Thomas’ position is what he himself asserts in his discussion of the
passions that we will look at just below: the passions are good, not bad, precisely to the
extent that they are subject to the command of reason. Here Fr Copleston helps us to grasp
what St Thomas means:

The natural law is expressed passively in man’s natural inclinations, while it is

promulgated by the light of reason reflecting on those inclinations, so that
inasmuch as every man naturally possesses the inclinations to the end of man
and possesses also the light of reason, the eternal law is sufficiently promulgated
for every man.[4]

Two sayings of St John of Sinai in the Ladder of Divine Ascent seem apposite here: ‘The
monastic life is the forcing of nature so as to attain to that which is above nature,’ and, ‘The
angel is the light of the monk; the monk of the layman.’ There is a different orientation in the
East from the West. The East is oriented to the ‘true light that enlightens every man that
comes into the world’;[5] the West, to the grace that builds on nature.

There is nothing of the naturalism of the Summa in the ascetical doctrine of Evagrius
Pontikos that we will study in Volume II, nothing in the ascetical doctrine of St Mark the
Ascetic that we will refer to in Volume III, nothing in the ascetical and mystical synthesis of
St Hesychios that forms the subject of Volume III. St Thomas’ system has a naturalism that
is not found in the ascetical tradition of the Orthodox Church. We think that a reading of
Plotinus throws the difference into relief: while it would be excessive to suggest that
Orthodox asceticism is Neoplatonist, Orthodox asceticism is certainly far more Platonic in its
anthropology as concerns the nature of the passions and the proper task of man in regard to
them than is the doctrine of St Thomas in the Summa. In this, we think that St Thomas
introduced a sea change into the anthropology of the Roman Catholic Church, a sea change
which is precisely the introduction of an Aristotelianizing psychology in place of the previous
Platonizing psychology of the Roman Catholic Church.

It might be objected that we are comparing apples and oranges, that the Roman Catholic
ascetical tradition recognizes those aspects of asceticism that we are emphasizing over and
against the naturalism of St Thomas. To a certain extent this is true. However, we consider
that notwithstanding that there is a different orientation between the Orthodox Church and
the Roman Catholic Church on the matter.

Chapter IV -- 19

The final topic we wish to consider before we turn to a general discussion of St Thomas’
anthropology and psychology is St Thomas’ treatment of the passions. St Thomas begins his
‘Treatise on the Passions’ in ST Ia IIae, 22. We ourselves simply wish to distinguish St
Thomas’ treatment of the passions from the treatment of the Greek ascetical Fathers.

St Thomas first establishes that the soul has passions.[1]

St Thomas then establishes that the passions are in the sensitive appetite (i.e. in the
passionate part of the soul: the desire and the temper) not in the rational appetite (i.e. the
will).[2]

St Thomas points out that the passions are movements of the sensitive appetite and can only
exist where there is a modification to the body. That is, the passions cannot exist without a
bodily substrate. This is not the position of Evagrius Pontikos, although it does raise a
number of interesting and important questions.

St Thomas establishes that the passions of the concupiscible appetite (i.e. the desire) are
different from the passions of the irascible desire (i.e. the temper), just as those two powers
of the soul are different.[3] St Thomas’ analysis follows the logic that, the passions being
movements of a power of the soul, the movements must follow the nature of the power. The
object of the concupiscible power (i.e. desire) is the good and the bad, or, simply put, what is
enjoyable or unpleasant; the object of the irascible power (i.e. temper) is the good and the
bad under the aspect of the difficult or arduous: the irascible power operates in cases in
which the good is difficult to attain or in cases in which the bad is difficult to avoid.
Therefore all the passions which view in an absolute way the good and the bad pertain to the
concupiscible power: joy, sadness, Eros (amor), hatred and such-like. Whichever passions,
however, consider the good and the bad in respect of its arduousness, as something which
can be attained or avoided only with a certain difficulty—these passions pertain to the
irascible power: bravery, fear, hope and such-like.

This is a somewhat different analysis of the passions from the analysis of Evagrius Pontikos
that we will study in Volume II.

St Thomas establishes that considered in themselves, the passions, taken by him to be simple
movements of the soul, cannot be considered to be either morally good or morally bad.[4]
Only insofar as they are considered with regard to their submission to the command
(imperio) of the reason, can there be moral good or moral badness in them. This is one of the
bases of the naturalism of St Thomas that we referred to.

St Thomas establishes that not all the passions of the soul are morally bad.[5] Here he has an
interesting discussion on the difference between the Stoics and Aristotle in the matter of the
goodness or badness of the passions: the Stoics, says St Thomas, treated all the passions as
bad, whereas the Peripatetics treated the moderate passions as good. St Thomas comments
that while on the surface there appears to be a great difference between these two points of
view, in fact if we consider the intentions of the authors, there is little or no difference. St
Thomas’ argument revolves around his analysis of Stoic psychology and terminates in the
assertion that by ‘passion’ the Stoics meant every motion of the soul which surpassed the
limits of reason. This is how he glosses Cicero. However, according to St Thomas’ analysis,
the Peripatetics treated as passions all the movements of the sensitive part of the soul; and as
good those which were moderated by reason, as bad only those which were beyond the
moderation of reason. St Thomas agrees with this point of view. St Thomas concludes by
observing that the passions should not be called illnesses or disturbances of the soul unless
they are not subject to the moderation of reason.

While this may be a faithful rendition of Aristotle, the concept of passion in the Greek
ascetical tradition is different.

The Greek ascetical tradition, based on Evagrius Pontikos, takes a negative view of the
passions, more in line, it seems, with the Stoics. In the Greek tradition, the passion is a
disorder of a power or part of the soul, which disorder is a result of the Fall of Adam. The
goal of the ascetic is to restore that part of the soul which functions in a disordered way, as
manifested by the operation of the passion, to its functioning according to nature, as God
created Adam, as Adam and Eve lived in Paradise before they fell. Hence, in the Greek
ascetical tradition, a number of passions are identified which in fact constitute the most
general types of sin. That is how, through St John Cassian, the disciple of Evagrius Pontikos,
the passions entered into mediæval Scholastic thought: as the Seven Deadly Sins.[6]

The passion, in the Greek ascetical tradition, is an operation of a part of the soul contrary to
nature, and the goal of the ascetic is to restore that part of the soul to its operation according
to nature. This is the ascetical program leading to dispassion (apatheia) that we discussed
earlier. It is noteworthy that dispassion (apatheia) is defined by Evagrius in the Treatise on
the Practical Life[7] as the divestiture of the passions of, and the simultaneous acquisition of
the virtues of, the passionate part of the soul, the desire and the temper. Dispassion
(apatheia) is considered by him to bring about the complete ascetical separation or
autonomy of the soul from the body.

As we saw in Chapter I, St Macrina herself actually put forward two models of the passions,
the one that is quite similar to the Greek ascetical model which we have just outlined, the
model of the ascetical writers that we will consider, and the other, more theoretical and
based on Aristotle. However, we think that St Thomas has a more naturalistic attitude to the
passions than we find even in St Macrina’s second, Aristotelianizing model, since St Macrina
retains a fundamentally Platonizing point of view.

St Thomas next establishes that the passion augments or diminishes the goodness or
badness of an act[8]—in accordance surely with the nature of the act and the nature of the
passion, since in St Thomas the passions are not necessarily bad. This is a necessary remark
for him to make given that he will later turn to moral theology.

St Thomas establishes that that there are passions which are good or bad in their kind
(species), that is, by their very nature.[9] His argument depends on the notions that an
intrinsically good passion is one whose object itself is in conformance with, or according to,
reason, such as modesty; and that an intrinsically bad passion is one whose object itself is
contrary to reason, such as envy. Note the dependence of St Thomas’ argumentation on the
notions ‘in conformance with, or according to, reason’ and ‘contrary to reason’. These should
be compared to the notions in the Greek Fathers ‘in conformance with, or according to,
nature’ and ‘contrary to nature’.

St Thomas establishes that the passions of the concupiscible power (i.e. desire) are logically
prior to the passions of the irascible power (i.e. temper).[10] This is so because the passions
of the irascible power deal with the difficulty of attaining the good or of avoiding the bad,
whereas the initial desire for the good and the initial aversion from the bad are matters of the
concupiscible power. Curiously enough, in Skemmata 41,[11] Evagrius has the same opinion
that the desire is prior to the temper, although he does not give the same reason as St
Thomas:

41 Of the thoughts, some lead while others follow. And those thoughts lead which are from <desire
(epithumia)>, whereas those thoughts follow which are from the temper (thumos).

Evagrius then goes on with a somewhat more refined psychological analysis than St Thomas:

42 Of those thoughts which lead, some again go before whereas others follow. And those go before,
then, which are from gluttony, whereas those follow which are from fornication.
 43 Of those thoughts which follow the first thoughts, some lead whereas others follow. And those lead
which are from sorrow (lupe), whereas those follow which are from wrath (orge), if indeed, according to
the proverb, ‘A sorrowful word stirs up wraths.’ [Cf. Prov. 15, 1.]

St Thomas establishes that love or Eros (amor) is the first or chief passion of the
concupiscible part.[12] It should be noted that the Latin word amor can be translated ‘love’
in the sense of charity or spiritual love (Greek: agape) or in the sense of impassioned love,
desire or Eros (Greek: eros). It is not always clear in what sense that St Thomas wants us to
take ‘amor’. For in this article St Thomas quotes St Augustine as follows: ‘All passions are
caused by Eros (amor); for Eros (amor) desiring to have that which is loved (amatur) is
desire; having and enjoying it, however, it is joy (laetitia).’[13] St Thomas continues:
‘Therefore Eros (amor) is the first passion of the concupiscible power.’[14]

This approach of St Thomas—and of St Augustine—is interesting for its similarity to Evagrius

Pontikos’ treatment of the nature of the passions in Treatise on the Practical Life, Chapter 4:

4 Whatever one loves (eros) he certainly aspires to, and what he aspires to he
struggles to attain. And desire is the beginning of every pleasure; desire, then,
begets sense-perception, for that which is without a share in sense-perception is
also free of passion.[15]

It was with this passage of Evagrius Pontikos in mind that we have rendered amor by Eros in
translating passages from the Summa.

St Thomas establishes that hope is the first or chief passion of the irascible power.[16]

St Thomas establishes that the four principal passions are joy, sadness, hope and fear.[17] St
Thomas observes, although he does not accept that point of view, that in this list St
Augustine puts desire in place of hope.

St Thomas doctrine of the four principal passions is completely different from the doctrine of
the eight most general passions of Evagrius Pontikos that underlies much of the Philokalia
and even much of the ascetical tradition of the West. In part this is a question of
terminology, since in the West the eight most general passions of Evagrius reappear even in
mediæval times as the Seven Deadly Sins; in part there is a basic difference in St Thomas’
psychology, which is derived not only from St Augustine but also from Aristotle. For St
Thomas has posited that the passions of the concupiscible and irascible powers of the soul
are neither good nor bad in themselves, but only insofar as they are or are not moderated by
the control of the reason. Evagrius Pontikos, however, clearly views the passions to be
tendencies of the ascetic to sin, tendencies which are excited by a demon which thereby
brings about a temptation. The good passions that St Thomas identifies, Evagrius certainly
recognizes, but not as passions: they are either virtues or the natural seeds of the virtues. St
Mark the Ascetic, it would appear, has the same understanding of the matter as Evagrius,[18]
for his analysis of temptation is sufficiently close to that of Evagrius for it to be
incomprehensible if the passions are considered to be neither good nor bad except insofar as
they are subject to the reason.

For the Roman Catholic interested in the spirituality of the Philokalia, there is a basic
difference in the psychological analysis of temptation and sin: St Thomas views sin as the
immoderate use of a movement of the soul he calls a passion, an immoderate use that stems
from a lack of control over the movement by the reason, always to be understood as
ratiocination, even ratiocination expressing itself in practical syllogisms. The ascetical
tradition of the Philokalia, however, treats sin as commencing with the excitation of one of
the eight most general passions; this excitation manifests itself as the appearance in the field
of consciousness of the ascetic of an image, which image is charged with passionate content.
The ascetic is expected always to reject the image, thus to reject the temptation. We
discussed this earlier.[19] In the models of temptation and sin of Evagrius, of St Mark the
Ascetic and of St Hesychios, the image is never considered good or even neutral: its goodness
or even neutrality is considered spurious. Although, it seems to us, a Thomistically-trained
monk could adapt himself to the model of temptation of the authors represented in the
Philokalia, he would have to be aware that St Thomas is conducting a completely different
analysis of the psychology of the passions.

It is in the analysis of the passions that St Thomas’ naturalism manifests itself most clearly,
and it is apparent that this naturalism derives from Aristotle.

Gilson describes St Augustine’s own doctrine of the four passions as follows:

 All the sensible movements of the soul are reduced to four fundamental passions: desire (cupiditas), joy
(laetitia), fear (metus) and sorrow (tristitia); for to desire is to consent to a movement by which the will
inclines towards an object; to rejoice is to delight in the possession of the object obtained; to fear is to
cede to the movement of the soul which recoils before an object from which it turns away; to experience
sorrow, finally, is not to consent to a movement which actually has been suffered. Thus every movement
of the soul tends either towards a good so as to acquire or conserve it, or away from an evil so as to avoid
or avert it; but the free movement of the soul to acquire or to conserve something is the will itself; all the
movements of the soul therefore depend on the will.[20]

This is very important, for it is quite different from St Thomas’ own analysis, although St
Thomas evidently has derived his own analysis from St Augustine’s. It seems to us that St
Augustine’s analysis is closer to that of the Philokalia.

We have finished our presentation of the anthropology and psychology of St Thomas Aquinas, and it
remains for us to discuss it.

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[1] ST Ia IIae, 22, 1.

[2] ST Ia IIae, 22, 3.

[3] ST Ia IIae, 23, 1.

[4] ST Ia IIae, 24, 1.

[5] ST Ia IIae, 24, 2.

[6] Actually, the number in Evagrius is eight: in the West two passions were assimilated into one deadly sin.
[7] See Volume II.

[8] ST Ia IIae, 24, 3.

[9] ST Ia IIae, 24, 4.

[10] ST Ia IIae, 25, 1.

[11] See Volume II.

[12] ST Ia IIae, 25, 2.

[13] De Civit. Dei, 14.

[14] Ibid.

[15] See Volume II.

[16] ST Ia IIae, 25, 3.

[17] ST Ia IIae, 25, 4.

[18] Without for all that having any obvious doctrinal dependence on Evagrius.

[19] Under ST Ia IIae, 10, 3,

[20] Gilson Aug p. 171

 Chapter IV -- 20

With respect to those aspects of anthropology and psychology that are important for bioethics, there
are no real differences between St Thomas’ model of man and the Orthodox model of man: the
differences that there are, are minor, the reflections of different philosophical orientations, and those
differences are easily accounted for. The only unusual aspect of St Thomas’ anthropology is his
doctrine of the succession of souls in the conceptus, a doctrine that the Roman Catholic Church does
not seem ever to have accepted at its face value.

Of course, this is not to say that St Thomas’ moral theology is the same as Orthodox moral theology,
but that is another matter.

With regard to the articulation of a theology of bioethics there is an aspect of St Thomas’ system, one
we have not discussed, which sets Roman Catholic moral theology apart from the Orthodox tradition.
This is the different uses that the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches make of the concept of
‘natural law’. St Thomas reduces the concept of natural law to the Stoic concept of the conformance of
an action with reason, understood as always to be ratiocination. Moreover, this Stoic concept of the
conformance of an act with reason is injected by St Thomas into a naturalistic ethic based both on
Aristotle’s psychology and ethics, and on a strictly Aristotelian metaphysic which includes the four
causes, including the final cause or natural purpose of an act. Hence, in moral theology the Roman
Catholic Church takes a rather more rigidly rationalistic, Aristotelian approach to the concept of
natural law than does the Orthodox Church. While the concept of natural law is certainly not absent
from Orthodox Patristic theology—expressed normally in the form ‘according to nature – contrary to
nature’—what is very characteristic of St Thomas is his extremely systematizing and systematic
application to moral theology of his concept of the natural law.

Moreover, although we did not have the interest to pursue St Thomas’ moral theology, its air is very
legalistic, much more than we ourselves thought probable. Hence, the extreme rationalism of St
Thomas’ application of the Aristotelian concept of fourfold causation in his treatment of the natural
law is coupled to an extreme legalism in moral theology.

It might be remarked that St Augustine is far less rationalistic on the natural law than is St Thomas,
even though St Thomas has derived much of the formal content of his doctrine from St Augustine. For
in St Augustine, the precepts of the natural law are ‘rules’ or ‘lights’ that are taught to the mind
(pensée) by the ‘interior Master (Maître intérieur)’, or ‘unveiled to the sight of the soul by the true
light which enlightens every man who comes into the world’. These are ‘the true and immutable rules
of wisdom, evident to the mind (pensée) which turns itself to them, and common to all’.[1]
The ‘eternal law’ of St Augustine is by Gilson made equivalent to the natural law, perhaps reasonably.
In the case of St Thomas Aquinas, St Thomas’ discussion of law starts with the eternal law, and
considers the natural law to be the projection of the eternal law into the realm of human reason.
According to Gilson’s presentation, however, in St Augustine the ‘natural law’ is the injection into our
own conscience (‘transcription in our soul’) of the precepts of the eternal law, where those precepts
have the same character as the eternal reasons in the Mind of God.[2]

As Gilson further states:

…Just as our truth is nothing more than a participation in the Truth, and our beatitude a
participation in Beatitude, so also each man does not become virtuous except in
conforming his soul to the immutable rules and to the lights of the Virtues, which live
eternally in the Truth and in the Wisdom common to all men. The four cardinal virtues
of prudence, strength (force), temperance and justice have no other origin; inversely the
common origin of the vices is the movement of a will which, turning itself from these
intelligible realities which are common to all, turns itself towards the bodies so as to
appropriate those bodies. What are the functions of these four fundamental virtues?

Temperance restrains the carnal desires and prevents them from dominating the mind
(pensée); it therefore prepares the ways for the acquisition of wisdom, by preventing us
from desiring contrary to the spirit, but it does no more than prepare those ways, for no
one here below is wise to the point of having overcome perfectly all conflict between the
flesh and the spirit.[3] Prudence discerns the good from the evil and it avoids for us
every error in the choice of that which must be done or avoided; it is that which teaches
us, for example, that it is bad to consent to sin and good not to give way to the
enticement of desire. Justice has for its function to give to each one that which pertains
to him; by it there is established in man a sort of order, in virtue of which the body is
submitted to the soul and the soul to God.[4]

St Augustine is much closer to the spirituality of the Philokalia.

Let us now turn to issues in the anthropology and psychology of St Thomas Aquinas which have a
bearing on the spirituality of the Philokalia.
What is in question is the possibility for man in this life intuitively to apprehend intelligible realities
and, in particular, the possibility in this life of the mystical experience of God. St Thomas’ system
provides in some fashion for mystical experience. St Thomas writes this:[5]

[Contrary Assertion:] But the matter is the contrary; it is what the Apostle says in 1 Cor.
15, 46: ‘What is spiritual is not first, but what is animal.’ For to see God in essence is
most spiritual. Therefore, the first man, being in the first condition of the life of the
[rational] animal, did not see God in essence.

[Body of Article:] I reply to what is said, that the first man did not see God in essence
according to the common condition of his life, except perhaps if it be said that he saw in
rapture (raptu), as when ‘God put a sleep into Adam,’ as Gen. 2, 21 says. And the reason
for this is that, since the divine essence is itself beatitude, the intellect of him who sees
the divine essence is in the same mode in respect of God that any man is in respect of
beatitude. It is manifest, however, that no man can by his will turn aside from beatitude;
for naturally and out of necessity man wishes beatitude and flees misery. Whence, no
one seeing God in essence is able voluntarily to turn aside from God, which very thing is
sin.

Let us interrupt here. We see here two aspects of St Thomas’ mystical psychology: The Beatific Vision
(beatitude) is a vision of the essence of God and it can only be known after death, for the simple
reason that if a man knew it before death—even in the case of the first man, Adam, in Paradise before
the Fall—then he would never be able to sin: ‘naturally and out of necessity man wishes beatitude and
flees misery’. In other words, once one participates in the Beatific Vision, one is ‘locked’ into it by the
metaphysical nature of his will, which, according to St Thomas, is a hunger and thirst after that very
Beatific Vision. Man, once he attains to the Beatific Vision, cannot do otherwise on account of the
nature of his will than remain in the Beatific Vision.

We are somewhat puzzled by St Thomas’ doctrine that the will is an appetite that ‘naturally and out of
necessity’ wishes the good, and in particular the Beatific Vision. We do not know what to make of this
doctrine of the will as a necessary tendency to the Beatific Vision, which doctrine we have not
encountered among the Greek Fathers. Certainly St John of Damascus, following Aristotle, has a
doctrine that the will is an appetite, just as we have seen in the extended passage on will and action
from the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith that we quoted above.[6] However, St Thomas has
taken the idea much further.
For the purposes of comparison with St Thomas’ own system, let us remark that Evagrius Pontikos
posits in his own heretical cosmological system that all the minds (noes) after their creation at first
engaged in the Beatific Vision—Evagrius does not use this term but surely his sense is equivalent—and
then, in an act of ‘negligence’ initiated by the Devil, turned away from the Beatific Vision. [7] St
Thomas is saying that this negligence would have been impossible on account of the very nature of the
human will.

Let us continue with the passage from the Summa where we left off:

And on account of this, all those who see God in essence are thus established in the love
of God so that they are not able to sin in eternity. Therefore, since Adam sinned, it is
manifest that he had not seen God in essence. However, he knew God with a certain sort
of knowledge (cognitione) higher than that with which we now know God. And thus in
some way his knowledge was intermediate between the knowledge proper to the present
condition [i.e. of man after the Fall] and the knowledge proper to the fatherland [i.e.
Heaven], where God is seen in essence. Towards the demonstration of this, it must be
considered that the vision of God in essence is distinguished from the vision of God in
his creature. However, by as much as the creature is higher and more similar to God, by
that much more can God clearly be seen in that creature, just as a man is more perfectly
seen in the mirror in which his image is more expressly formed. And thus it follows that
God is seen much more clearly in [his] intelligible effects than in [his] sensible and
corporeal effects. However, man is impeded in the present [post-Fall] condition [of life]
from a full and clear consideration of intelligible effects in that he is distracted by
sensible things and occupied around them. But, just as it is said in Eccl. 7, 29, ‘God made
man upright.’ However, this was the rectitude of man by divine institution so that the
inferior [powers of the soul—the desire, the temper and the vegetative power—; also the
body] were subject to the superior [powers of the soul—the intellect and the will] and the
superior [powers of the soul] were not impeded by the inferior [powers of the soul and
the body]. Whence, the first man was not impeded by external things from a clear and
stable contemplation of intelligible effects, which he perceived by an irradiation of the
First Truth, either by natural knowledge or by grace (gratuita). Whence, St Augustine
says in Super Gen. ad lit. 11, 33, that: ‘Most probably, God previously spoke with the first
men just as he speaks with the angels, illumining their minds with his unchanging truth,
but with not so great a participation in the divine essence as the angels receive.’
Therefore by the intelligible effects of God of this sort, he [the first man, Adam,] knew
God more clearly than by the mode we ourselves know [him].
The first point we need to make is that because of St Thomas’ doctrine of the Beatific Vision as the
vision of God in his essence, it is somewhat difficult to map St Thomas’ categories of thought directly
onto the categories of thought of St John of Damascus, with whom we shall deal to a certain extent
just below and more extensively in Chapter V. For the concept of the vision of the essence of God, the
Beatific Vision, seems to be a peculiarly Western doctrine deriving from St Augustine himself. It is
not, in the form that it is expressed by St Thomas, a doctrine of the Greek Fathers. For the Greek
Fathers do not make use of a concept of the vision of the essence of God. Hence, in comparing two
passages, it is somewhat difficult to grasp whether St Thomas and a Greek Father are talking about the
same thing.

The next point is that St Thomas’ doctrine of the distinction between the vision of God in his essence
and the vision of God in his creature corresponds quite closely to the distinction that Evagrius
Pontikos makes between Theology, the vision of God himself, and natural contemplation, the vision of
God in his creature.[8]

St Thomas’ description of the vision of God in his creature, and his remark that the more elevated the
creature is, the more it reflects God, corresponds to the distinction that Evagrius makes between the
second and first natural contemplations. Second natural contemplation is the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of material objects created by God; first natural contemplation is the contemplation of
the angels themselves. Evagrius would wholeheartedly agree with St Thomas’ remarks: first, that the
higher the creature, the more clearly God is seen in that creature; and, second, that God is more
clearly seen in his intelligible effects than in his corporeal effects. (Evagrius also clearly asserts that it
is the wisdom of God that is seen in natural contemplation, not his nature—that is, not his essence.)
For in Evagrius, the principle of the mystical ascent is for the ascetic who has attained to dispassion
(apatheia) to ascend to God through the second and first natural contemplations, which
contemplations successively purify his mind (nous) by raising it from material realities to intelligible
realities, and thence to God.

In the passage just quoted, St Thomas, despite his extremely rationalistic theory of human cognition,
does rather strikingly express a doctrine of the capacity of the human mind to cognize intelligible
realities intuitively. The views expressed in this article are so striking that we wonder to what extent St
Thomas’ remarks in it are integrated into his doctrine that in this life man’s mind or intellect works
naturally only by ratiocination.

St Thomas does exclude the possibility that Adam before the Fall contemplated the angels in essence,
reiterating his doctrine that man in this life, even before the Fall, naturally and properly cognizes
intelligible realities only on the basis of the abstraction of concepts from the perceptions of objects of
sense.[9] However, he does concede that Adam and Eve before the Fall had a much more perfect
knowledge of the angels than we after the Fall have of them. But the contemplation of angels is first
natural contemplation, although Evagrius himself never discusses whether in first natural
contemplation the angels are contemplated in essence.

St Thomas goes on to say,[10] referring explicitly to St Dionysios the Areopagite, On the Divine
Names, Chapter IV, that man has three degrees of knowledge: First, a knowledge of exterior things,
which St Thomas himself assimilates to his doctrine of the abstraction of concepts from sense-
perception. Second, that knowledge to which the soul attains when it ascends to that which unites it to
the superior virtues, that is to say, to the angels. This, according to St Thomas, is an imperfect
knowledge. Third, that knowledge to which the human soul attains when it is led further, to the Good
which is above all goods, to God himself. According to St Thomas, the knowledge to which the soul
attains at this stage is even more imperfect than in the second stage. In St Thomas’ interpretation,
when the human soul attains to the higher virtues—that is, to the angels—and thence to God, it attains
to a knowledge of these higher realities that is imperfect precisely because of the limitation of natural
human cognition to abstraction from the data of sense-perception, even in the case of Adam and Eve
before the Fall. However, St Thomas says, because Adam and Eve’s bodies were perfectly submitted to
their reason, their knowledge of these higher realities was much more perfect than that which man
enjoys after the Fall.

This doctrine of St Dionysios the Areopagite of the three stages of knowledge seems very similar to
Evagrius’ own doctrine of the three stages of the spiritual ascent. For in Evagrius’ system, when the
ascetic puts off the passions of the passionate part of the soul in attaining to dispassion (apatheia), he
simultaneously attains to the virtues of that part of the soul. Moreover, the attainment to dispassion
(apatheia) also brings about the ascetical separation of the soul from the body, in the sense that the
soul becomes autonomous of the body. In Evagrius’ system, then, once the ascetic has attained to
dispassion (apatheia), he commences an upward ascent through second natural contemplation and
first natural contemplation to Theology, the contemplation of God himself. And, of course, in the
Evagrian system, this ascent through second and first natural contemplation to the contemplation of
God is an ascent of knowledge—gnosis. This seems very similar to what St Thomas has taken from St
Dionysios.

The reason for this similarity between the doctrine of Evagrius and the doctrine of the three degrees of
knowledge that St Thomas has taken from St Dionysios might be due to the fact that St Dionysios—
that is, the pseudonymous author of the works attributed to St Dionysios the Areopagite—was familiar
with the works of Evagrius.[11]
However, there is a problem with all this: If the reference in our edition of the Summa[12] to Chapter
IV of On the Divine Names be correct, then the only passage that can be found there that addresses
the knowledge of the human soul is Chapter IV, 9. However, reference both to the English
translation[13] and to the text of Migne[14] demonstrates that while St Dionysios refers in the
passage to three types of knowledge, there is a mediocre fit between his text and St Thomas’ text.

In the passage concerned, St Dionysios refers to three ways to ascend to God: the first, the spiritual
gathering of oneself into oneself which grants one a unitary inner condition that unites him to the
angels and then leads him by the hand to God; the second, the illumination by God in discursive
reason; the third, the way of being led by means of all things which are external to the soul, as by
symbols, towards ‘simple and united contemplations’. The first way corresponds well to the final two
degrees of knowledge that St Thomas Aquinas lists; the last way reinterpreted according to St Thomas’
theory of cognition does service for the first degree. The second way of St Dionysios is ignored by St
Thomas. Is it that St Thomas has read into St Dionysios a mediæval Scholastic schema of the three
stages of the mystical life, a schema deriving ultimately from Evagrius by way of St John Cassian?

St Dionysios does have embedded in his works a doctrine of the three stages of knowledge—
purification, illumination and perfection—although it is not clearly expressed in the place cited by St
Thomas. These three stages of St Dionysios are similar to the three stages of spiritual ascent in
Evagrius, the practical life (praktike), natural contemplation and Theology.[15]

St Thomas seems to be adapting a doctrine of mystical ascent that he cannot ignore to his own
psychology that he has grounded in the rationalistic Aristotelianism that we have already encountered
in the Summa.[16] That this is so can be seen in St Thomas’ treatment of the eternal reasons in the
Mind of God: St Thomas, quoting St Augustine, accepts the doctrine that the soul knows all things in
the eternal reasons which exist in the Divine mind.[17] However, St Thomas reinterprets this
Neoplatonic doctrine. For he says that we know all things in the eternal reasons in the Mind of God in
the same sense that we see material things by the light of the sun: the created intellectual light of our
soul is a participation in and image of the Uncreated Light in which the eternal reasons are contained.
But in this life, St Thomas says, we cannot know the eternal reasons themselves, only after death,
when we enjoy the Beatific Vision. We discussed this matter earlier.

St Thomas seems to be faced with a problem: he cannot dismiss the Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition
deriving from St Augustine and St Dionysios the Areopagite; it is too important and too well-
established in Roman Catholic theology for that. However, it really does not fit into his
Aristotelianizing philosophy. So how does he proceed? He reinterprets the Neoplatonic doctrines. For
the plain sense of what St Augustine was teaching is not what St Thomas is saying.
Earlier, we discussed the connection between St Augustine’s doctrine of the eternal reasons and
Evagrius Pontikos’ doctrine of the reasons (logoi) of created things.[18] Suffice it to say here that a
fundamental structural component of the mystical ascent in Evagrius, the outline of which St
Hesychios accepts, is the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of created things in second natural
contemplation.

St Thomas has foreclosed the spirituality of the Philokalia in asserting that the contemplation of the
reasons (logoi) of created objects is possible only after death in the Beatific Vision. As we have already
remarked, part of the problem is the different placement of the reasons by St Augustine and by
Evagrius: St Augustine places them in the Mind of God, making the contemplation of the eternal
reasons a very high contemplation, whereas Evagrius places them in the wisdom of God expressed in
creation, making second natural contemplation a contemplation for the imperfect mind (nous).
However, the fundamental reason that St Thomas Aquinas excludes from this life the contemplation
of the eternal reasons in the Mind of God is that his cognitive psychology does not allow for it. A
person following the ascetical tradition of Evagrius found in the Philokalia would remark that what St
Thomas asserts is true for the perfection of the second natural contemplation: only after death in
Heaven would the ascetic see the reasons (logoi) of created things in their fullness—although even in
Heaven the ascetic would still be ever ignorant and ever learning. But such a follower of the Philokalia
would not on philosophical grounds exclude the second natural contemplation from life on this earth.

To return to the quotation on the state of Adam in Paradise before the Fall and on his conditions of
knowledge, the ‘intelligible effects’ of God to which St Thomas refers are to be understood to be
considered by him to be created effects, although we are struck by the phrase ‘by an irradiation of the
First Truth’, which refers to how Adam, the first man, intuitively cognized the intelligible effects of
God. For we have already seen St Augustine’s doctrine of the divine light which shines on intelligibles
to make them visible to the intelligence, the power of the soul of intuitive cognition; and that is the
most obvious interpretation of what St Thomas is saying here: it is clear that St Thomas is dependent
on St Augustine in the article of the Summa under consideration. This doctrine of intuitive cognition
‘by an irradiation of the First Truth’ seems very close to the Orthodox doctrine of the uncreated
operations (aktistes energeies) of God. This ‘irradiation of the First Truth’ St Thomas clearly attaches
to the intuitive cognition by the first man of the intelligible effects of God—what we, using Evagrius’
terminology, would call natural contemplation—but it is in the sense of ‘an irradiation of the First
Truth’ that St Gregory Palamas taught us that God can be known by his uncreated operations (aktistes
energeies) in the Uncreated Light. Moreover, it would seem that St Augustine viewed the divine light
which illumined man to be God himself. There are rather striking parallels between the doctrine of the
Philokalia and the doctrines of St Augustine.
The next point in our discussion concerns St Thomas’ remark that ‘man is impeded in the present
[post-Fall] condition [of life] from a full and clear consideration of intelligible effects in that he is
distracted by sensible things, and is occupied around them’. This is to be contrasted with the condition
of Adam in Paradise. In the passage under consideration, St Thomas himself refers both to the
uprightness of Adam as he was created and to the complete subjection of Adam’s body to his soul in
Paradise. These were doctrines of St Augustine.[19]

Now on the basis of the passage under consideration, it seems to us that St Thomas is saying this
absolutely: this distraction by sensible things is in man in this life after the Fall an insurmountable
barrier to the contemplation of ‘intelligible effects’—the created intelligible effects of God. This would
accord with St Thomas’ insistence that in our post-Fall condition of life our natural mode of
apprehension is by means of ratiocination working with propositions based on concepts abstracted
from sense-perception. It is not at all probable that St Thomas means that man can in this post-Fall
condition of life regain the state of Adam in Paradise with regard to the contemplation of God by
means of God’s ‘intelligible effects’ in his creatures.

However, this is precisely the point of the ascetical psychology of Evagrius Pontikos, St Mark the
Ascetic and St Hesychios: by following their ascetical program, we can by grace attain to the state of
Adam in Paradise before the Fall.

Moreover, St Hesychios quotes St Athanasios the Great from the Life of Anthony on the matter,[20] in
passages that refer to the uprightness of man as he was created and to the restoration of the spiritual
part of the soul to its condition according to nature, as man was created: ‘For the soul to be upright—
this is the mental part (to noeron) in it according to nature as it was created.’[21] Moreover, it is clear
that St Athanasios is putting St Anthony forward as a type of the ascetic who has attained to this
degree of sanctification, as a model for all Christians.

If we understand St Thomas aright, then he is saying that the vision of God himself, the vision of God
in essence, the Beatific Vision, is attainable only in the next life, even in the case of Adam before the
Fall except, in Adam’s case, in the possible case of a rapture (raptus) put on Adam by God himself.
However, following his interpretation of St Dionysios the Areopagite, he is also saying that man can
attain to a certain imperfect knowledge of God even in this life.

Moreover, St Thomas is saying that a partial knowledge of God in God’s creatures by means of God’s
‘intelligible effects’, due to an ‘irradiation of the First Truth’, was enjoyed by Adam in Paradise before
the Fall, but cannot naturally be attained by man after the Fall. We take these ‘intelligible effects’ of
God to be more or less parallel to the second stage of knowledge that St Thomas has drawn from St
Dionysios the Areopagite. We think that St Thomas would therefore concede the possibility of a
certain imperfect knowledge by man in this life of God in his ‘intelligible effects’, or even in his angels.
However, we think that he is excluding the fullness of the first natural contemplation, the
contemplation of the angels, as that contemplation is taught by Evagrius.

Moreover, St Thomas is saying that the natural mode of apprehension for man, even before the Fall, is
by ratiocination working with propositions based on concepts abstracted from perceptions of objects
of sense.

Finally, we understand by implication that St Thomas is teaching that only by supernatural grace can
a man attain to intuitive knowledge of intelligible realities and of God. It is in this sense that we should
understand St Thomas’ reference in the passage under consideration to a possible rapture (raptus) of
Adam in Paradise, by which Adam would have seen the essence of God. It seems to us that the concept
of ‘rapture (raptus)’ that St Thomas uses is taken from St Augustine, possibly also the notion that in
the ‘rapture (raptus)’ man can see the divine essence itself.

Gilson discusses the concept of rapture (raptus) in St Augustine.[22] Gilson himself in discussing St
Augustine’s mystical doctrine distinguishes among the vision of God’s substance, the vision of the
light of God and the vision of the eternal reasons, all in Gilson’s reading of St Augustine being possible
in mystical ecstasy—rapture (raptus)—in this life.

It seems to us that St Thomas’ emphasis in his cognitive psychology on ratiocination and his exclusion
of a natural capacity of man for intuitive cognition, such as even St Augustine taught, causes a very
sharp disjunction in his theology between the natural conditions of knowledge of man in this life—
those being based on the Aristotelian doctrine of ratiocination working with propositions based on
concepts abstracted from sense-perception—and the supernatural conditions of mystical experience
for man in this life. Since there is in St Thomas’ doctrine no natural capacity of man in this life to
cognize intelligible realities intuitively, there must be a very sharp break between a man’s natural
cognition in ordinary affairs and his supernatural cognition in mystical experience. This sharp break
between man’s natural capacity for intuitive cognition—limited to the intuitive apprehension of the
first principles such as the law of the excluded middle—and man’s supernatural cognition in mystical
experience leads in our view to an emphasis on the role in mystical experience of rapture (raptus) or
ecstasy. For the man must somehow pass from the ordinary conditions of rational or empirical
cognition to a supernatural state of mystical, intuitive cognition.
In discussing this matter, we are emphasizing the sharp disjunction between the natural and
supernatural modes of knowledge in St Thomas, but that should not mislead our readers into thinking
that we are minimizing the role of Grace in the spiritual ascent of the Christian. What we are doing is
pointing out that a doctrine, such as underlies the Philokalia, which accepts that man has a natural
capacity intuitively to cognize intelligible realities, necessarily has a different orientation to mystical
experience than a doctrine in which man has no such natural capacity in this life for intuitive
cognition and in which mystical experience is solely by means of a supernatural intervention of grace
in rapture (raptus). In this, St Augustine’s psychology is closer to that of the Philokalia than is the
psychology of St Thomas.

We understand this to be the basis of the emphasis on ‘rapture (raptus)’ in later Roman Catholic
mysticism.

If this is the proper interpretation of St Thomas’ thought, then there is a basic difference between the
theology of St Thomas and the mystical theology underlying the Philokalia.

For the mystical path with which we shall in Volume III culminate this study, the method of sobriety
of St Hesychios, a key figure in the earliest strata of the Philokalia, is based quite extensively and
directly on the mystical psychology of Evagrius, which itself teaches us clearly that man can ascend
through natural contemplation to the vision of God himself. Moreover, there is not the sharp break
between the natural capacities of man and the supernatural grace for mystical experience that is
required in St Thomas’ system by its exclusion of the natural capacity in this life of the intellect to
cognize intelligible realities intuitively.

Moreover, as we have already remarked, Evagrius Pontikos explicitly teaches the divestiture by the
ascetic of sense impressions and of the recollections of sense impressions so that the ascetic might
ascend in natural contemplation to the intuitive cognition of the ‘intelligible effects’ of God, to use St
Thomas’ language; and thence to the intuitive cognition of God.

The key passage is Chapter 40 of On the Thoughts by Evagrius, which discusses how the ascetic can
pass from ordinary perceptions of the objects of sense to intuitive apprehensions of intelligible
realities and thence to the mystical apprehension of God.[23] Moreover, Chapter 40 of On the
Thoughts is substantially quoted, with approval, by St Hesychios in Chapter 89 of On Sobriety.[24]

But Chapter 40 of On the Thoughts is clearly based on the premise that the mind (nous) of man really
has the possibility intuitively to cognize not only basic epistemological principles such as the law of the
excluded middle and the axiom that the whole is greater than the part—as St Thomas asserts is the
mind’s only natural mode of intuitive cognition in this life—but also intelligible realities such as the
reasons (logoi) of created beings, angels themselves, and, finally, God himself. This is not to exclude
the role of Grace in the mystical ascent but to emphasize that the ascetical psychology underlying the
Philokalia has a more open attitude towards the natural ability of man in this life intuitively to cognize
intelligible realities.

Of course, St Gregory Palamas, that Father of the Orthodox Church, taught us that we do not ever see
the essence of God but that we are illumined by his uncreated operations (aktistes energeies). On the
one hand, the Orthodox doctrine differs from that of St Thomas in its rejection of the notion of the
vision of the essence of God. On the other hand it differs from St Thomas in teaching that we can be
illumined even in this life by the uncreated operations (aktistes energeies) of God, and not merely by
his created effects or even his intelligible created effects. Moreover, in Orthodox doctrine, the
uncreated operations of God are experienced in mystical illumination as light: the Uncreated Light.
Significantly, St Gregory Palamas, in Huper ton Hieros Hesuchazonton (In Defence of Those Keeping
Stillness in a Holy Manner),[25] quotes Chapter 39 of On the Thoughts—attributing it of course to St
Neilos the Ascetic[26]—as a proof text for the possibility of cognizing God in this way: that chapter of
Evagrius explicitly addresses the vision of God, and that as light. Moreover, much of the refutation of
Barlaam in this work of St Gregory is dedicated to proofs that God can be known in this way.

Of course, there is an apophatic element in this intuitive cognition, and, because of the limitations of
the created human intellect in the body, the intuition is never a full cognition of the intelligible reality
or, especially, of God himself.

What is taught by Evagrius Pontikos in his mystical psychology is close to what St Thomas Aquinas
seems to imply in the passage that we have been discussing: were we only able to divest ourselves of
sensible distractions, then we too would be able to cognize the ‘intelligible effects’ of God. The
difference is that Evagrius asserts that this is indeed possible, whereas St Thomas denies it. Moreover,
Evagrius provides an ascetical psychology which includes a method for accomplishing this divestiture.
And St Hesychios follows him on the matter. We are here at a basic stratum of the spirituality of the
Philokalia.

The question becomes this: In St Thomas’ psychology of cognition, how is his insistence on the
primacy of ratiocination and his limitation of the human mind’s power of intuitive cognition to the
first principles of reason to be reconciled with his notion that Adam in Paradise cognized God by
God’s ‘intelligible effects’ in the same way that an angel is illumined by God? For St Thomas said this:
 Whence, the first man was not impeded by external things from a clear and
stable contemplation of intelligible effects, which he perceived by an irradiation
of the First Truth, either by natural knowledge or by grace (gratuita). Whence,
St Augustine says in Super Gen. ad lit. 13 that: ‘Most probably, God previously
spoke with the first men just as he speaks with the angels, illumining their
minds with his unchanging truth, but with not so great a participation in the
divine essence as the angels receive.’[27]

This seems to be far beyond the intuitive cognition of the first principles of reason. One might have
thought that St Thomas means that supernaturally, by grace, the first man, Adam, was enabled to
cognize these ‘intelligible effects’ of God, but the passage clearly indicates that St Thomas does not
limit himself to grace, holding the possibility open that a natural power of man’s intellect was
involved. But this seems to fly in the face of St Thomas’ cognitive psychology. Is the answer that St
Thomas believes that a consequence of the Fall is that, although Adam, the first man, could indeed
engage in the ‘clear and stable contemplation of intelligible effects, which he perceived by an
irradiation of the First Truth’, we ourselves because of the Fall cannot?

This seems to be the case, for St Thomas also states that before the Fall, the inferior (in our
terminology, the passionate) part of the soul and the body were completely subject to the superior part
of the soul, so that the superior part of the soul was not impeded in its apprehension of the ‘intelligible
effects’ of God.[28] The program of the Philokalia, however, is precisely to bring the inferior part of
the soul, the passions, and the body, into complete subjection and harmony with the superior part of
the soul in dispassion (apatheia), and thence to proceed to the contemplation of the reasons (logoi) of
created things, the contemplation of angels and thence to the contemplation of God himself.

St Thomas’ identification[29] of the ‘superior reason’, that which pertains to spiritual things, with the
‘inferior reason’, that which pertains to temporal things, in such a way as to make the natural mode of
cognition for man in this life ratiocination has also foreclosed the mystical path of the Philokalia.
Perhaps that is why Roman Catholic commentators on Hesychasm—including Barlaam, St Gregory
Palamas’ great opponent in the Fourteenth Century—were either bemused or scandalized by
Hesychasm: they had been taught not only by St Thomas Aquinas but by other Western philosophers
and theologians that an intuitive apprehension of intelligible realities, including of God himself, was
naturally impossible in this life and that the proper way to proceed was by the way of propositional
knowledge. Perhaps the notion of bringing the mind into the heart (‘gazing at the belly button’) as a
preliminary to an ascetical ascent towards the intuitive apprehension of intelligible realities seemed to
them preposterous: in this life, they had been taught, man proceeds by reason based on concepts
abstracted from sense-perception, not by intuitive cognition. That this was Barlaam’s own probable
point of view can be discerned in Huper ton Hieros Hesuchazonton, in St Gregory Palamas’ references
to Barlaam’s proposed system of education: it was essentially a mediæval program of higher studies
based on the philosophical principle that one can only proceed by reason to propositions of a higher
and higher philosophical and theological import.[30]

Would a Thomistically-trained monk be able to practise the spirituality of the Philokalia? For since
the Thomistically-trained monk is prevented by the cognitive psychology of St Thomas from pursuing
intuitive cognitions of intelligible realities, how would he understand the repetition of the Jesus
Prayer? As we shall see in Volume III, in St Hesychios—and even in St Diadochos of Photike, writing
at a very early time, about 450—the repetition of the Jesus Prayer is intimately connected to an
ascetical ascent to the intuitive apprehension of intelligible realities, including the intuitive
apprehension of God himself. Would not the Thomistically-trained monk be inclined to view the
repetition of the Prayer of Jesus as some sort of mechanical procedure to concentrate the mind, a
mechanical procedure working on the body, working on the lower faculties of the soul that depend on
the body, working on the sensitive appetite and sensitive powers of the soul? While the Prayer
certainly has the effect of concentrating the mind (nous), it is not merely a mechanical method for
recollecting the mind from dispersion: it is a method of concentrating the mind in the heart, and then,
by fighting the immaterial war against the thoughts, of ascending by the active divestiture of sense-
perceptions and recollections of sense-perceptions, and by the grace of the Holy Spirit, to an intuitive
cognition of intelligible realities, including an intuitive cognition of God himself.

It is sometimes remarked that Roman Catholic spirituality places a great emphasis on the imagination
(in the ordinary acceptation of the word). Is not the reason precisely this, that Thomist psychology
makes no provision for another approach? For in St Thomas’ cognitive psychology, the intellect is
restricted to the reason and cannot, except for first principles such as the law of the excluded middle,
attain to intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities. That leaves the sensitive powers of the soul
(the common sense, the fantasy, the memorative power and the particular judgement) and the
sensitive appetite (the temper and the desire: the emotions) as the powers of the soul that can be
cultivated by the monk who wishes to approach God by a road other than that of reason. The monk is
left, in St Thomas’ system, with the fantasy and the powers and passions of the sensitive appetite (i.e.
the temper and the desire) as the tools with which he can work spiritually.

Is not imagination taken as a spiritual method the directed use of the power of fantasy? The directed
use of the power of fantasy is completely foreign to the spirituality of the Philokalia. In the tradition of
the spirituality of the Philokalia, fantasy is the primary means for a demon to sow a temptation; and
the goal of the ascetic is to reject temptation by rejecting every fantasy at the instant of its inception as
an image in his field of consciousness: this is the immaterial war of the thoughts. Moreover, the whole
thrust of the Philokalia being the divestiture of sense-perceptions and recollections of sense-
perceptions, so that the ascetic might attain to intuitive apprehensions of intelligible realities, it is
impossible for a monk following the road of the Philokalia to engage in the directed use of the power
of fantasy.

Is not the foreclosure of the road of intuitive cognition by St Thomas’ cognitive psychology also the
reason the Thomistically-trained monk engages in sentimental forms of spirituality? Of course, it
would be naïve of us to suggest that there have been no non-Thomistically-trained monks in the
history of the Orders of the Roman Catholic Church, or to suggest that there have never been
Thomistically-trained mystics in the Roman Catholic Church, or to suggest that all Roman Catholic
monks engage in sentimental spirituality. But the question remains: to the extent that the cognitive
psychology of St Thomas here being discussed teaches that the human being in this life cannot
naturally attain to intuitive apprehensions of intelligible and divine realities, how is the Thomistically-
trained monk going to proceed?

Is not sentimentality as a spiritual method the directed use of the passions—the movements of the
sensitive appetite in St Thomas Aquinas’ terminology? Of course, in Volume III we shall see that the
desire operating according to nature and the temper operating according to nature are attached by the
ascetic to the repetition of the Prayer of Jesus, which in any event is prayed ‘from the heart’ or ‘in a
heartfelt way’. However, these things are done in the context of a strict and severe sobriety based both
on the repetition of the Prayer of Jesus and on the prosecution of the immaterial war against the
thoughts: the use of sentiment is controlled by and subordinated to the noetic aspect of the method of
spiritual ascesis. And, of course, the use that the ascetic makes of the various parts of his soul—or, if
we wish, of the various powers of his simple, not complex, soul—is assisted and transfigured by the
grace of the Holy Spirit.

If we are correct, then the fundamental problem for the Thomistically-trained monk in approaching
the Jesus Prayer is in the exclusion by St Thomas’ cognitive psychology of the possibility of natural
intuitive apprehensions in this life of intelligible realities, including God. To the extent however, that
the Thomistically-trained monk accepts ST Ia, 94, 1, quoted above, as expressing St Thomas’ true
thoughts, then it becomes a matter of his accepting that it is possible in this life, even after the Fall of
Adam, for him to divest himself of sense-perceptions which distract him from the intuitive perception
of the ‘intelligible effects’ of God so that he might ascend through the second and first natural
contemplations to the contemplation of God himself; that at the heart of the Philokalia is a method for
doing this; and that the Jesus Prayer is a part of this method.
For the doctrine of the Orthodox Church is the return even in this life through divinization (theosis) to
the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall, and, through the Ascension of Christ, even to surpass that
state of Adam and Eve before the Fall.[31]

Moreover, in the spirituality of the Philokalia, the ascent to the intuitive apprehension of God himself
is not seen as the cultivation or expectation of a state of ecstasy or rapture (Latin: raptus), such as St
Thomas holds was the only possibility for Adam in Paradise to know God in essence. For while the
grace of God is certainly necessary for an intuitive apprehension of God, and while raptures of the
mind (Greek: arpages tou nou) do occur on the mystical journey, the way of the Philokalia does not
exclude the natural ability of man to apprehend intelligible realities intuitively: Orthodox theology and
psychology have not foreclosed the possibility for man in this life—through ascesis, certainly; and with
the grace of God, certainly—naturally to know intelligible realities intuitively, including the reasons
(logoi) of created objects, angels and God himself. In the Orthodox tradition of the Philokalia, there is
not the sharp disjunction between the natural capacities of man and the supernatural graces of
mystical illumination that is implied by St Thomas’ doctrine that the natural mode of cognition for
man in this life is by the abstraction of concepts from the data of sense-perception.

We shall see in Chapter V that St John of Damascus, in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,
explicitly makes provision for the intuitive apprehension of God in this life when he remarks that
before the Fall the food of Adam and Eve in Paradise was the contemplation of God, Adam and Eve
being nourished by the contemplation of God as if they were angels. For St John, as we shall see, was
aware of the Orthodox doctrine of the divinization (theosis) of man and describes the comportment of
Adam and Eve before the Fall in Paradise as a model of what we ourselves can attain to in this life. As
we have already remarked, however, we cannot be certain if the contemplation of God that St John
speaks of corresponds to the Beatific Vision of St Thomas—since, as far as we know, St John nowhere
makes use of the concept of the vision of God in essence, which is for St Thomas the Beatific Vision.

However, St John speaks clearly of the contemplation of God himself and not of the contemplation of
the ‘intelligible effects of God’, although he does refer to an ascent to the contemplation of God
through the contemplation of God’s creatures. We ourselves understand St John to mean by that, that
the ascetic’s mind is raised to the contemplation of God by means of the contemplation of his
creatures: the ascetic does not remain in the contemplation of creatures but proceeds—ascends—
through the contemplation of creatures to the contemplation of God. We take this contemplation of
creatures to be the contemplation of God in his ‘intelligible effects’ that St Thomas speaks of, and we
identify it with the natural contemplation of Evagrius. Moreover, following St Gregory Palamas, we
gloss St John to say that these ‘intelligible effects’ reflect the uncreated operations (aktistes energeies)
of God—that ‘irradiation of the First Truth’ that St Thomas himself speaks of, following St Augustine.
This seems to be largely the sense of the passage from St Augustine that St Thomas quotes in ST Ia,
94, 1, concerning how God illumined man in much the same way as he now illumines the angels.
Indeed, Gilson discusses a doctrine of St Augustine similar to that of St John of Damascus, of the
passage from the contemplation of the intelligible effects of God to the brief contemplation of God
himself and back again.[32] This is a doctrine of the alternations of natural contemplation with
Theology in the personal contemplative life of the mystic such as even Evagrius would accept.[33]

It might be remarked that the contemplation of God in Paradise before the Fall that St John of
Damascus posits in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith seems structurally very similar to the
contemplation of God before the Movement that Evagrius posits in his own heretical system.[34] We
are not suggesting that St John of Damascus and Evagrius Pontikos have the same doctrine—God
forbid!—, but it seems to us that in St John’s description of life in Eden before the Fall, the
contemplation of God represents the transposition of the Evagrian concept of the initial
contemplation of God by the minds (noes) before the Movement into the Orthodox context of the
comportment in Eden of Adam and Eve before the Fall. That this is conceivable might be gleaned from
the facts that St John of Damascus was heavily indebted to St Maximos the Confessor and that St
Maximos was influenced by Evagrius: it may be that the doctrine of St John of Damascus is an
Orthodox version of the doctrine of Evagrius by way of an assimilation of Evagrius’ heretical doctrine
into Orthodoxy by St Maximos the Confessor. In any event, we are here asserting that whatever its
literary provenance, St John of Damascus’ doctrine of the pre-Fall contemplation of God by Adam and
Eve in Paradise is perfectly Orthodox.

Moreover, we are also asserting that while there is most likely not a simple correspondence between St
Thomas’ ‘vision of God in essence’, the Beatific Vision, and St John of Damascus’ ‘contemplation of
God in Paradise before the Fall’, the fact that St Thomas distinguishes the contemplation of God in
essence from the contemplation of God in his creatures, whereas the Greek tradition distinguishes the
contemplation of God himself from the contemplation of God in his creatures suggests that St
Thomas’ vision of God in essence indeed is to be understood as structurally equivalent to St John of
Damascus’ contemplation of God. We say ‘structurally equivalent’ to indicate that ultimately the same
concept is involved, although the formal content of the concept might not be the same in each writer.

In conclusion, we can discern two aspects of St Thomas’ system that are of relevance to us. First, in
regard to those basic aspects of anthropology which are of relevance to bioethics, St Thomas adheres
closely to the Roman Catholic tradition deriving from St Augustine, which tradition is very similar to
the tradition of the Orthodox Church: man is composed of body and soul; the soul is a separately
existing substance which can subsist outside the body although it is naturally made to subsist within
the body.
With regard to bioethics, however, the different uses that the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic
Churches make of the notion of natural law sets Roman Catholic Church moral theology somewhat
apart from the Orthodox tradition. Moreover, St Thomas’ moral theology is very legalistic.

The second aspect of St Thomas’ system which is of relevance to us is his psychology as it affects the
practice of the spirituality of the Philokalia. As we have seen, St Thomas’ cognitive psychology is
incompatible with the spirituality of the Philokalia. We hope that we have assisted the Roman
Catholic reader interested in the Philokalia to assess the differences between the two psychologies. We
think that the psychology of St Augustine is closer to the psychology of the Philokalia, although we
doubt that a monk trained in St Augustine would be interested in the Philokalia.

We think that St Thomas’ theory of action is too rationalistic to be valid.

An aspect of St Thomas’ psychology that is far beyond the scope of this work is the nature of that
psychology with regard to those subtle aspects of it which would influence pastoral care. We have
suggested that this psychology has three important aspects: its rationalism and its naturalism and its
legalism. St Thomas’ psychology would, it seems to us, give the pastor a different understanding of
human nature than would Orthodox psychology. The pastor would evaluate his charge’s actions and
motivations differently. He would have a different view of the nature of human drives and human
behaviour. He would give different pastoral direction for the same situation and the same condition of
his charge. This is a very subtle matter.

In the next chapter we will discuss the vocation of man, beginning with St John of Damascus’
description of the way of life of Adam and Eve in Paradise.

[5] A key passage is ST Ia, 94, 1. It is of such basic importance to our discussion that we here present
the contrary assertion and the body of the article in full.

[8] We will discuss Evagrius’ doctrines of Theology and natural contemplation in Volume II; we have
already discussed them above in Section 5, ‘The Evagrian Doctrine of the Minds (Noes)’, in Chapter
III.

[11] On this see Golitzin, Chapter VIII, especially Section C. ‘Summary and Discussion: Evagrius and
Areopagitica’.
[26] In the manuscript tradition this is a common misattribution for On the Thoughts.

[30] A discussion of Barlaam’s theory of knowledge from the point of view of an Orthodox can be
found in J. Meyendorff’s A Study of Gregory Palamas: Part One, Chapter III, ‘Barlaam and the
Councils of 1341’, pp. 42–7 (historical treatment) and Part Two, Chapter I, ‘Opposition to Profane
Hellenism: Man Deprived of Grace’, pp. 116–18 (theological treatment) (Meyendorff). Meyendorff
describes Barlaam as a ‘nominalist humanist’, although he also refers to Barlaam’s Platonizing
tendencies, surely something incompatible with being a nominalist. A discussion of Barlaam’s theory
of knowledge from the point of view of a Roman Catholic can be found in R. E. Sinkewicz’ article,
‘Gregory Palamas’, Section III, ‘Theology’, in La Théologie Byzantine et sa Tradition, pp. 155–7
(Conticello). The nature of the courses of studies in the Western mediæval universities, the various
editions of Aristotle that were popular and their content, and the uses made of the works of Aristotle
by students and scholars in the mediæval universities are all treated in historical depth in Chapters I,
II and III of the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Medieval).

[33] See Skemmata 22 in Appendix 3 of Volume II; the passage is quoted and discussed in Volume II
in the commentary on On the Thoughts 40.

Chapter V -- 1

V THE VOCATION OF MAN

In the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II, 11, St John of Damascus describes
Paradise:

Since, then, out of the visible and the invisible creation God was going to fashion man in his own image
and likeness as a kind of king and ruler of all the earth and of those things which are on the earth, he
first made for man a sort of kingdom, inhabiting the which man would have a blessed and truly happy
life. This is the divine Garden (paradeisos) which has been planted by the hands of God in Eden, a
treasury of every joy and gladness of heart. For ‘Eden (Edem)’ is interpreted ‘voluptuousness’. It was in
the east, lying higher than all the earth, temperate, illumined with an air fine and most pure, adorned
with ever-blooming plants, filled with a pleasant odour, full of light, surpassing the thought of every
sensible grace and beauty, being a divine place, really, and worthy of the inhabitant made in the image
of God, a place in which none of the animals took up its abode, but only man, fashioned by the divine
hands.
In the middle of this Garden, God planted the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of
Knowledge was a certain trial and test and exercise of the obedience and disobedience of the man.
Wherefore it has also been called the Tree of Knowing Good and Evil, for to those who communicated of
it, it was wont to give a gnostic power concerning their own familiar nature, which very thing is good in
the perfect, bad, however, in the more imperfect—and even in those also who are the more gluttonous
for sensation—as solid food is in those who yet require milk. For God who created us did not wish that
we be anxious and troubled about many things, neither that we should become persons who took care
for or were the administrators of our own life. Which very thing, indeed, Adam also suffered. For
tasting, he knew that he was naked and he acquired for himself a girdle about his loins: for taking leaves
of the fig tree, he girded himself [cf. Gen. 3, 7]. Before the knowledge, however, ‘Both Adam and Eve
were naked and were not ashamed.’ [Gen. 2, 25.] God wished us, then, to be dispassionate (apatheis) in
this way—for this is of extreme dispassion (apatheia)—, and even without care, having one work
(ergon), that of the angels: to hymn continually and without cease the Creator and to delight in the
contemplation of him and to throw upon him the care of ourselves. Which very thing the Prophet David
also plainly spoke to us, saying: ‘Cast your care upon the Lord and he will feed you.’ [Ps. 54, 23.] And in
the Sacred Gospels, teaching his own disciples, he says: ‘Do not take care for your soul (psuche), what
you will eat, and for your body, with what you will clothe yourselves.’ [Luke 12, 22.] And again: ‘Ask for
the Kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be added to you.’ [Cf. Matt. 6, 33.] And
towards Martha: ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; there is need of one
thing, then. Maria chose the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,’ [Luke 10, 41] that is
to say, to sit by his feet and to hear his words.

The Tree of Life, then, was either a tree having the operation (energeia) that provides life, or edible to
those alone who were worthy of life and who were not subject to death.

At all events, certain persons have imagined that the Garden was sensible; others, however, that it was
intelligible. However, it seems to me that just as the man was created both sensible and intelligible, thus
also the most sacred temple of this man was both sensible and intelligible, having a double appearance.
For, in body having his abode in the most divine and exceedingly beautiful place as we described, in soul
(psuche) he sojourned in a more noble and incomparable and much more beautiful place, having as a
dwelling God, the Indwelling, and having him as a glorious covering and having been encompassed with
his grace and delighting as a sort of other angel in the sole fruit of his contemplation and being
nourished by this.

Which very thing, truly, was also called worthily the Tree of Life. For life not having been interrupted by
death, a share in the sweetness of divine participation is given to those who communicate [in the fruit of
the Tree of Life, that is to say, in the contemplation of God himself]. Which truly God also called ‘every
tree’. He says: ‘Thou shalt eat of every tree which is in the Garden.’ [Gen. 2, 16.] For he is the All, in
whom and through whom is the all.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, is the discrimination of the contemplation split
into many parts. This, then, is the full knowledge of one’s own nature, which is good in the perfect and
 in those who have lived in the divine contemplation, from itself publishing the magnificence of the
works of God, in those who have not feared a change since through time they have come into the habit of
the contemplation of this sort. It is not good, however, in those who are yet youths and the more
gluttonous for desire, for on account of the uncertainty of the sojourn in those things which are better
and on account of their not having taken up their place firmly in sitting by the Sole Good, this solicitude
for their own body by nature draws them towards that body and distracts them.

Thus I deem the divine Garden to have been double. And the God-bearing Fathers instructed truly,
some teaching in this way and some in that way.

It is possible to conceive of ‘every tree’ as the full knowledge of the divine power occurring from all the
creatures, as says the divine Apostle: ‘Those things which are invisible and apprehended by thought
concerning him from the creation of the world, his eternal power and Divinity, are seen clearly in those
things which have been made.’ [Rom. 1, 20.]

By nature, the contemplation which pertains to us, I say, that which is of our constitution, is loftier than
all these conceptions and contemplations, as the divine David says: ‘The gnosis of Thee out of me has
been wondered at,’ [Ps. 138, 6] that is, [the gnosis] which is out of my making. This [gnosis], then, was
precarious for Adam, being newly fixed, for the reasons that we said.

Or, the Tree of Life was the more divine conception occurring from all sensible things and the ascent by
means of them to the Author and Creator and Cause of all things, which very thing he also called ‘every
tree’, the full and undivided, bearing participation only in the good.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then, was the sensible and pleasureful food, that which
sweetens in appearance but which in reality establishes him who partakes of it in the communion of evil
things. For God says: ‘From every tree which is in Garden you may eat for food.’ [Gen. 2, 16.] I deem this
to mean: ‘By means of all the creatures ascend to me, the Maker,’ saying: ‘And thou shalt reap one fruit
from all of them, me, truly Life. Let all things bear Life as fruit for thee, and make participation in me
the constitution of your own existence; for thus shalt thou be immortal.’ ‘From the Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, thou shalt not eat from it. In that day, then, that you eat from it,
you will die with death.’ [Gen. 2, 17.] For naturally, sensible food is the restoration of that which passes
away, and it proceeds into the privy and into corruption; and it is impossible for that which has come to
be in the communion of sensible food to remain incorruptible.[1]

What is St John saying? First, let us note the polarity of the ‘visible’ and the ‘invisible’ both in
the creation and in man’s nature. The visible is that which is sensible; the invisible is that
which is intelligible. Right from the beginning of St John’s approach to the creation of man,
we see this distinction between that which is sensible in man and that which is intelligible:
man’s body and man’s soul. St John then proceeds to a very poetic description of the sensible
aspects of Eden. It should be understood that St John will proceed to a very elevated
discussion of the intelligible aspects of Adam and Eve’s sojourn in Eden; here he is merely
describing the sensible aspects of Eden.

We next see the two trees described in the account of Eden in Genesis. Note that the Tree of
Knowledge is described, in accordance with the tradition of the Fathers, as a ‘certain trial
and test and exercise of the obedience and disobedience of the man’.

St John then proceeds to a description of the nature of the Tree of Knowledge. Following St
Gregory the Theologian, he describes the Tree of Knowledge as providing to those who
partook of it a ‘gnostic power concerning their own familiar nature’. What this means is that
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge made the one who partook of it able to contemplate his
own nature. Evagrius Pontikos, who was a student of St Gregory the Theologian, refers in the
Kephalaia Gnostica VI, 72 to a contemplation of the body that seems to be related to this
idea that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge purveyed a gnosis of the human constitution—for
that is what St John of Damascus means.[2]

St John makes clear that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was good for those who were
perfect, but bad for those who were not—with the clear implication that Adam and Eve were
not yet ready to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, but that at some future time they would have
been.

He then returns to the Genesis account, saying, in what seems a bit of a non sequitur, that
God did not wish us to be anxious and troubled about many things, nor persons who cared
for or who administered their own life. For, St John says, when Adam ate of the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge—evidently thus having attained to a gnosis of his own constitution—he
realized that he was naked and he took care for his own life, that he be clothed on account of
the shame of his nakedness. St John then remarks, quoting Genesis, that before the
knowledge, ‘Both Adam and Eve were naked and not ashamed.’ He then, in a very important
remark, connects this lack of shame before the tasting of the fruit to the concept of
dispassion (apatheia): he says that it is of extreme dispassion (apatheia) not to be ashamed
of one’s own nakedness: this was the condition of Adam and Eve before they received the
gnosis of their own constitution purveyed to them by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Moreover, St John remarks, God wanted us to be dispassionate men and women of this sort
—so dispassionate that we would not be ashamed of our own nakedness. It is important to
note the use of the concept of dispassion (apatheia) in such a central work as this of the
Orthodox Patristic tradition.

St John continues, in a very important discussion of contemplation, that God wanted us to

be without care, and to have only one work in our lives, that of the angels. This work of the
angels is not only the traditional angelic work of hymning unceasingly and continually the
Creator, but also the work of delighting in the contemplation of God and of throwing all one’s
cares upon him. It is clear that here St John is introducing the height of monastic virtue: he
has departed somewhat from the life of Adam and Eve before the Fall to describe the ideal
life of man after the Fall: the life of the Hesychast. One is reminded of St John’s description,
near the end of Barlaam and Ioasaph,[3] of the way of life of Barlaam and Ioasaph when
they were, after all their adventures, living as Hesychasts in the caves of the desert, a
description reminiscent of the Hesychast way of life described in the ascetical homilies of St
Isaac the Syrian.[4] For it is clear that St John wants us to take in a literal and not
metaphorical way the proof texts that he has here provided: we are to cast all our care upon
the Lord and to delight in the contemplation of him alone.

St John then turns, after a digression on the dual nature of the Garden—both sensible and
intelligible—, to a discussion of the Tree of Life.

First let us look at how St John describes the intelligible aspect of the Garden. He states that
intelligibly Adam sojourned:

in a more noble and incomparable and much more beautiful place, having as a dwelling God, the
Indwelling, and having him as a glorious covering and having been encompassed with his grace and
delighting as a sort of other angel in the sole fruit of his contemplation and being nourished with this.

Is this the Beatific Vision of St Thomas Aquinas? Is it the ‘clear and stable contemplation of
intelligible effects, which he [Adam] perceived by an irradiation of the First Truth, either by
natural knowledge or by grace (gratuita)’ of St Thomas?[5] St Thomas had clearly read—in
Latin translation surely, for his Latin quotations are not easily matchable to the original
Greek—the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. But the thought categories of St Thomas
Aquinas are not exactly those of St John of Damascus: it is futile to discuss whether St John
of Damascus is here discussing the Beatific Vision or the contemplation of God in his
intelligible effects as these are understood by St Thomas. For St John clearly is referring to a
contemplation of God which is comparable to the contemplation of God by an angel, and
there is no sense that an angel contemplates anything other than God himself. Moreover, the
description of Adam as dwelling in God, the Indwelling, and as having God as his covering
and as being encompassed by God’s grace and as delighting solely in the contemplation of
God and as being nourished solely by that contemplation of God, strongly suggests that St
John of Damascus understands that this is the contemplation of God himself, and not a
contemplation of God in his ‘intelligible effects’. But nowhere does St John of Damascus
discuss the vision of God in his essence.

To return to St John, what St John is describing is Theology, unitive prayer to God. That is,
he is describing the contemplation of God attainable in mystical experience in this life.
Certainly he has put this description of the contemplation of God into the context of the
condition of Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, but just as certainly his intent is
not so much to divert himself with a description of what man has irrevocably lost as to
indicate what it is to which man must attain.

The next paragraph clarifies certain aspects of St John’s doctrine. The contemplation by
Adam just described is identified with the Tree of Life. Moreover, St John goes on to identify
the Tree of Life with God himself. The sense of this very elliptical passage is this: The
contemplation of God is itself the Tree of Life. But since the contemplation of God, the Tree
of Life, grants ‘a share in the sweetness of divine participation’,[6] the Tree of Life is
assimilated to God himself.[7] The contemplation of God, the Tree of Life, is also ‘every tree’.
But in St John’s last remark ‘every tree’ is again assimilated to God: ‘[H]e is the All, in whom
and through whom is the all.’ There is an allusion to Christ here, by way of the opening lines
of the Gospel of John.[8]

The contemplation of God is the Tree of Life. This Tree of Life is both God himself and the
‘every tree’ in the Garden from which Adam and Eve were allowed to eat. God himself is the
‘every tree’ in the garden from which Adam and Eve were permitted to eat. What St John of
Damascus is driving at is that Adam and Eve were nourished exclusively by the very
contemplation of God himself—hence, the ‘every tree’ from which they were permitted to eat
was both God himself and the contemplation of God himself.

St John then goes on to discuss the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here, he returns
to his original description of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as providing to the partaker a
gnostic power concerning the partaker’s own familiar constitution. First, however, he
describes the Tree of Knowledge as the ‘discrimination of the contemplation split into many
parts.’ This refers to a contemplation of multiplicity. It should be understood that, implicitly,
St John has described the contemplation of God, that which is purveyed by, or that which
indeed is, the Tree of Life, as simple: not complex, not manifold, not multiple, not resting in
multiplicity.

St Isaac the Syrian in one of his homilies discusses the difference between the simplicity of
spiritual knowledge and the multiplicity of mere human knowledge:

Take care, lest you think in any wise that a man receives that other, spiritual knowledge through this
merely human [in the Greek: psuchikos] knowledge of ours. But I say that not only is it impossible for
that other, spiritual knowledge to be received by this merely human knowledge, but not even an inkling
of it can be perceived by those who are zealous to train themselves in such knowledge. And if any one of
these men should wish to approach the knowledge of the spirit, then until they repudiate human
knowledge, all the intricacies of its subtlety, and all the convolutions of its method, and establish
themselves in a childlike manner of thought, they will not be able to draw near to it, not even by ever so
little. Even the customary employment of human knowledge and its notions are a great hindrance to
these men, until little by little they erase these things [from their minds [interpolation of the English
translator]]. Spiritual knowledge is simple and does not shine upon human conceptions. Until our mind
has been freed from its many conceptions and enters the unified simplicity of purity [i.e. dispassion], it
can never experience spiritual knowledge.

This order of knowledge is the experiencing of delight that belongs to the life of that other Age. Hence it
holds multiple deliberations in contempt. But human knowledge cannot know anything else except a
multiplicity of deliberations. It cannot know that which is received in the simplicity [according to the
note of the English translator, perhaps: ‘limpid purity’] of the mind, according to Him Who says, ‘Except
ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of God.’ [Matt. 18, 3.] …[9]

The simple contemplation of God in St John of Damascus purveyed by the Tree of Life
corresponds to the spiritual knowledge of St Isaac; the contemplation of multiplicity in St
John of Damascus purveyed by the Tree of Knowledge corresponds to the merely human
knowledge of St Isaac. St John’s presentation of the way of life of Adam and Eve in Paradise,
and of the nature of the Tree of Knowledge is connected to his understanding of
contemplation in this life, and that understanding, as we see in the quotation from St Isaac
the Syrian, is connected to Mesopotamian spirituality. But these connections are also evident
in Barlaam and Ioasaph. It would be an interesting topic for someone to do a study on: the
connections of St John of Damascus with Mesopotamian Christian spirituality.

Hence, there is a strong thematic polarity between the simple contemplation of God himself,
associated with the Tree of Life, and the contemplation of multiplicity provided by the Tree
of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Moreover, this polarity of the simplicity of the
contemplation of God and the multiplicity of the contemplation split into many parts is a
polarity between the intelligible and the sensible: the simple contemplation of God is
intelligible whereas the complex contemplation split into many parts is sensible. St John
again says that this latter contemplation was not intrinsically evil and that it purveyed to the
partaker the full knowledge of his own nature—of his own constitution. Not only is this
contemplation, in St John’s view, not intrinsically evil, but in those who are perfect and in
those who have lived in the divine contemplation—in Theology, in unitive prayer to God—it
is good, since it publishes the magnificence of the works of God. But St John qualifies his
doctrine: the contemplation of one’s own constitution is good for those who need not fear a
change for the worse since they have made the contemplation of God a habit through long
exercise, that is, since they have attained to a habit of stability in their contemplation of God.

This contemplation of one’s own familiar nature—of the constitution or of the body of the
one who is conducting the contemplation—is a kind of natural contemplation.

Continuing, in a discussion which applies more to contemplatives in this life than it does to
the condition of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall, St John states that this
contemplation of one’s own familiar constitution is not good for those who are yet youths
and those who are yet the more gluttonous for desire, or appetite, since because of their
instability in the higher contemplation, that of God himself, and because of their not having
firmly taken up their place in sitting by the Sole Good,[10] they are wont to be drawn
towards the body and distracted by the body from the true contemplation of God himself.

We are reminded of Chapter 25 of Evagrius Pontikos’ Gnostic:

 25 It is necessary to make those who dispute without having gnosis to approach
the truth not from the end but from the beginning. And it is necessary not to say
anything to young men concerning gnostic things, nor to permit them to touch
books of that sort, for they are not able to resist the falls that this contemplation
entails. That is why it is necessary to say to those who are combated by the
passions not the words of peace, but how they will triumph over their
adversaries. In fact, as the Ecclesiast says, ‘There is no discharge in the day of
battle.’ [Eccl. 8, 8.] Those, then, who are combated by the passions and who
examine the reasons (logoi) of bodies and of the bodiless [powers] resemble
those sick men who debate over health. But it is when the soul is moved with
difficulty by the passions that it is appropriate to taste these sweet honeycombs.
[11]

While it would be difficult to say that St John of Damascus had this chapter of the Gnostic
before his mind’s eye when he wrote the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, the
similarity between the two passages is striking.

What the two authors are saying is this: To those who are ‘combated by the passions’
(Evagrius Pontikos), ‘those who are yet youths and the more gluttonous for desire’ (St John
of Damascus), ‘it is necessary not to say anything … concerning gnostic things, nor to permit
them to touch books of that sort, for they are not able to resist the falls that this
contemplation entails’ (Evagrius), ‘for on account of the uncertainty of the sojourn in those
things which are better and on account of their not having firmly taken up their place in
sitting by the Sole Good, this solicitude for their own body by nature draws them towards
that body and distracts them’ (St John). Of course, there is a difference: Evagrius is referring
to all gnostic things, all contemplations, as being ill-advised for the young and the
passionate, that is, those combated by the passions, whereas St John of Damascus is saying
that a specific natural contemplation, that of the contemplator’s own constitution or body, is
ill-advised for those who are still passionate (that is his clear meaning), and for those who
are not able easily and firmly to maintain themselves in the contemplation of God.

St John of Damascus then returns to the dual nature—both sensible and intelligible—of the
Garden. He introduces the idea that the ‘every tree’ of the Genesis narrative refers to the full
knowledge or gnosis of the divine power that results from all the creatures. This clearly is
equivalent both to the contemplation of the ‘intelligible effects’ of God that St Thomas
Aquinas concedes to Adam in Paradise before the Fall, and to Evagrius Pontikos’ natural
contemplation. St John now clarifies why he has introduced the contemplation of one’s own
nature or constitution or body as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, why he has said that it is
good in the perfect but not suitable for youths, for those who are yet the more gluttonous for
desire and for those who have not yet been firmly established in the habit of the
contemplation of God himself: this contemplation of one’s own nature is the highest natural
contemplation, higher than all the others. The notion that the contemplation of the
constitution of man himself is the highest natural contemplation is certainly not due to
Evagrius Pontikos.

In the language of the West, in St John of Damascus’ view, the highest contemplation of God
in his ‘intelligible effects’ is the contemplation of the constitution, of the making, of man
himself. We remarked in the previous chapter that St Thomas Aquinas had placed man as a
very small and inferior part of a grand mosaic or hierarchy of being, whereas the Greek
Patristic tradition was more anthropocentric, treating man as the crown of creation. Here we
see an example of that: ‘By nature, the contemplation which pertains to us, I say, that which
is of our constitution, is loftier than all these conceptions and contemplations…’ St John of
Damascus is here teaching us that we ascend to God through the contemplation of God’s
‘intelligible effects’—through the contemplation of his creatures: natural contemplation.
Moreover, St John is saying that the contemplation which is of man’s own nature, of man’s
own making by God, is the highest natural contemplation, the highest contemplation of God
in his ‘intelligible effects’. It is in this sense that he quotes the psalm of David: ‘The gnosis of
Thee out of me has been wondered at.’ (Ps. 138, 6.) St John means that the gnosis of God
which is purveyed by the contemplation of the constitution of man himself is a source of
great wonder to him. However, in St Thomas Aquinas, and even in Evagrius Pontikos, the
highest contemplation of the ‘intelligible effects’ of God, or the highest natural
contemplation, is not be the contemplation of man’s own constitution or making by God, but
the contemplation of the angels—for in those authors the angels are higher than man, even in
the capacity of their being to reveal God. But St John of Damascus himself is saying that
since man is the crown of creation, the contemplation of his constitution and of his making is
higher in its capacity to reveal God even than the contemplation of the angels.
However, St John of Damascus says, this gnosis by Adam of his own constitution—this is
how St John has consistently understood the gnosis which Adam received from the Tree of
Knowledge and by which Adam understood that he was naked—was dangerous for Adam
since he was newly fixed or newly made. This is to be understood in the context of St John’s
remarks on the dangers attendant on the contemplation of one’s own nature, to those who in
this life after the Fall have not yet attained to a habit of stability in their contemplation of
God himself.

At this point St John introduces with an initial ‘Or’ a second interpretation of the Tree of Life
and the Tree of Knowledge. Possibly, he considers that he is entitled to provide a dual
interpretation, one part corresponding to the intelligible aspect of the Garden, that of the
gnosis purveyed to Adam by the fruit of each tree, and one part corresponding to the sensible
aspect—the interpretation which he now proceeds to give.

St John begins with the Tree of Life, saying that the Tree of Life was ‘the more divine
conception occurring from all sensible things and the ascent by means of them to the Author
and Creator and Cause of all things’. This is natural contemplation taken as an ascent to God
from sensible things, an ascent to the contemplation of God from the contemplation of all
sensible things: here, natural contemplation is ‘the more divine conception occurring from
all sensible things’.

Now St John changes his view of what the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was. St John now
states that the fruit of ‘the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the sensible and
impleasured food, that which sweetens in appearance but which in reality establishes him
who partakes of it in the communion of evil things’. It is hard to see how this passage is
consistent with what St John has just said about the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’s being
the gnosis of the constitution of man, good in the perfect but bad in the young and imperfect.
This is a second, parallel interpretation. St John continues that the ‘every tree’ that was
permitted to Adam was the ascent by means of the contemplation of sensible creatures to
God himself, who is truly Life. This is the ascent to the contemplation of God himself by
means of the natural contemplation of sensible things. The second interpretation of St John
depends entirely on sensible things: the Tree of Life is the ascent by the contemplation of all
sensible things to God and the Tree of Knowledge is sensible food.
St John then places in the mouth of God an important statement concerning the vivifying
properties of the contemplation of God himself as attained through the contemplation of his
sensible creatures: ‘Let all things bear Life as fruit for thee, and make participation in me the
constitution of your own existence; for thus shalt thou be immortal.’ Here, Life and
Immortality are assimilated to the contemplation, by Adam and Eve in Paradise before the
Fall, of God himself by means of an ascent from the contemplation of sensible creatures,
natural contemplation. This is the meaning of the phrase, ‘Let all things bear Life as fruit for
thee…’: let the contemplation of sensible things, natural contemplation, bear Life as fruit for
you by leading you to the contemplation of Me, the true Life.[12] In Chapter IV, above, we
saw this contemplation referred to when we discussed a passage from St Dionysios the
Areopagite[13] concerning the three ways of knowledge: this contemplation is the third way,
the way of being led by means of the things which are external to the soul, as by symbols,
towards ‘simple and united contemplations’, here assimilated to the contemplation of God
himself. It is their departure from this simple contemplation of God himself, which was
attained by means of an ascent from the contemplation of God’s sensible creatures, in which
contemplation they had no cares or anxieties, nor need for material or sensible food, to the
sensible food provided by the Tree of Knowledge that in St John’s second interpretation
brought about Adam and Eve’s death. For here the harmful aspect of the Tree of Knowledge
is assimilated to the sensible nature of its fruit:

For, naturally, sensible food is the restoration of that which passes away, and it proceeds into the privy
and into corruption; and it is impossible for that which has come to be in the communion of sensible
food to remain incorruptible.

For St John has just established that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was sensible food.
Here, again, St John is influenced by the image of the Hesychast who engages in the
contemplation of God and who might be tempted to take care for sensible food. For we do
not think that St John is saying these things merely for the sake of the past: he is pointing to
the future.

What does St John mean?

St John is delineating the potentialities of man. That this is so can be seen from a
consideration of Barlaam and Ioasaph.[14] If one considers the catechetical purpose of that
work of St John of Damascus,[15] then when one comes to the end of the work one finds that
St John delineates an icon of the Hesychast way of life of Sts Barlaam and Ioasaph in the
desert, an icon that very closely corresponds to the description he has given here in the
Exposition of the way of life of Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall. There is a basic
difference here in the orientation of the Greek Fathers from the orientation of St Thomas
Aquinas on the matter of the contemplation of God. For the Orthodox tradition is
contemplative, not rationalistic. It does not limit the potential of man.

Hence, what we must understand from the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is that
man today, after the Fall, has the potential to live the life of Adam and Eve in Paradise before
the Fall. That is his task. That is his vocation.

Here is the foundation of our remarks in the previous chapter on the St Thomas Aquinas’
psychology of man, of our remarks on his legalism, of our remarks on his model of human
action, of our remarks on the particular or peculiar character of Thomism: for while the
Roman Catholic Church did not discard contemplation with its reception in St Thomas
Aquinas of a rationalistic, Aristotelian anthropology and psychology, it changed its
anthropological and psychological orientation to an understanding of man that forecloses
contemplation, reserving it for a strictly supernatural intervention of Grace.

We will now proceed to discuss the Orthodox conception of the vocation of man, but since St
John of Damascus himself immediately proceeds to discuss anthropology and psychology, let
us first continue with a brief o

[10] St John is alluding to Maria’s sitting by the feet of Jesus in the Gospel passage he has already quoted: Maria is a
type of the Hesychast.

[15] For it is a work of St John. For it to be a work of another hand, say that of St Euthymios of the Monastery of Iviron
on Athos, then St Euthymios would have had to go to a great deal of trouble to forge the style of St John of Damascus,
something that seems most unlikely

Chapter V -- 2
In the next chapter of the Exposition, II, 12, St John begins by making several important
points. First, the angels are bodiless only by comparison with the grossness of matter: only
the Divine is really immaterial and bodiless. This is to be taken to apply to the soul as well, as
we shall see below.

Next, St John draws on a passage of St Gregory the Theologian that is found in both St
Gregory’s Homily 38 on the Theophany and in his Homily 45 on Easter[1] in order to
develop his doctrine of the role of man as the link between the intelligible and sensible
orders of creation. We saw in Chapter I, above, that this idea had its roots in Stoicism. This is
what St John says:

…It was necessary that out of both [the sensible and the intelligible orders of creation] a mixing occur,
and, as Gregory who was inspired by God says, ‘a sign of greater wisdom and of the wealth of the
natures’, as a sort of bond of union ‘of the visible and the invisible natures’. The ‘it was necessary’ I say
alluding to the will of the Creator, for his will is a most seemly institution and law; and no one says to
the Creator: ‘Why didst thou make me thus?’ For the potter has authority to make out of his own clay
various vessels towards the demonstration of his own wisdom [cf. Rom. 9, 20].

Since, then, these things were so, out of the visible and the invisible nature with his own hands God
creates man in his own image (kat’ eikona) and likeness (homoiosin), on the one hand fashioning the
body out of earth, on the other hand, giving to man a rational and spiritual soul (psuchen de logiken kai
noeran) by means of his own inbreathing, which very thing, truly, we say is the divine image. For on the
one hand, the ‘in the image (kat’ eikona)’ declares the spiritual nature (to noeron) and the self-rule (to
autexousion); on the other hand, the ‘in the likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’, the likeness of virtue, as much
as is possible.

The body and soul have been fashioned together, not, according to the foolish words of Origen, first the

latter and then the former.[2]

We see the distinction of the sensible and the intelligible both in the creation itself and in the
creation of man. The significance of this distinction can be found in the doctrine, implicit in
St Gregory the Theologian, that man is the connecting link between the visible or sensible,
and invisible or intelligible orders of creation. St Maximos the Confessor repeats and
develops this doctrine. Arguments that this doctrine of the dual nature of man—that man is
both sensible and intelligible—is a remnant of Origenist thinking in the Church founder on
the Patristic credentials of the authors cited: this is the doctrine of the Orthodox Church.

We here also see an explanation of the dual nature of man: his body was fashioned out of the
dust of the earth, whereas his ‘rational and spiritual soul’ was given to him by the
inbreathing of God himself. We have seen in the last chapter that St Thomas Aquinas
retained this interpretation of the Genesis account of man’s creation.

St John places the image of God in man’s whole soul. More expressly, the ‘in the image (kat’
eikona)’ declares the spiritual nature (to noeron) and the self-rule (to autexousion) or free
will. The phrase here translated ‘the spiritual nature’, to noeron, is etymologically related to
the word nous, mind. Hence, the mental or spiritual nature of man and his free will
constitute for St John of Damascus the image of God in man. The reader may recall from
Chapter I that St Macrina herself posited that three powers constituted the image of God in
man: the contemplative (theoretiken) power, the discriminating (diakritiken) power and the
power of overseeing (epoptiken) existing things. If we consider that free will implicitly is
included by St Macrina in the image of God in man, then St Macrina’s three powers can be
considered to be an elucidation of the mental or spiritual nature (to noeron) about which St
John is speaking.

St John goes on to make an explicit distinction between ‘in the image (kat’ eikona)’ and ‘in
the likeness (kath’ homoiosin). St John most likely draws on St Maximos the Confessor for
this distinction, but it is well to know that the distinction is already found in St Diadochos of
Photike, writing about 450 in a work that we will discuss below. We have already seen St
Macrina develop the notion that the likeness of man to God is found in man’s virtue, and that
is how St John understands the matter: the likeness is a likeness of virtue to the extent that
such a likeness is possible for man taken both individually as a man, and generically as a
created, finite spiritual being. We discussed these matters in Chapter I.

As St John of Damascus will go on to make clear, although man’s soul is due to the
inbreathing of God, it is not of the same nature of God; it is not God but a created spiritual
nature.
Note the strong polarity, a polarity which will be emphasized by St John below as he
continues his quotation from St Gregory, between the visible, sensible nature of man’s body
and the invisible, intelligible nature of man’s soul. Although St John is an Aristotelian
philosopher, on this point his treatment of the human soul by means of a quotation from the
more Platonic St Gregory the Theologian accords even with the more Platonizing
anthropologies of St Gregory of Nyssa and St Augustine, and it also agrees on this particular
point with the strongly Aristotelianizing anthropology of St Thomas Aquinas.[3]

St John of Damascus treats the body and soul as having been fashioned together. While
certainly he is referring to the fashioning of the first man, Adam, his words are also to be
understood as referring to the fashioning of each man at his conception: there is no doctrine
in St John of Damascus of a succession of souls in the embryo such as St Thomas Aquinas
teaches.[4]

St John then proceeds to describe the condition of man in Paradise before the Fall. As will
become clear, he also is describing the potential of man after the Fall:

So God created the man innocent; upright; virtuous; without sorrow; without anxiety; having been made
utterly to shine with every virtue; adorned with all good things; ‘as a sort of second world, a small in the
large; … another angel; a mixed pilgrim; overseer of the visible creation; initiate of the creation which is
apprehended in thought; king of those things which are upon the earth, being ruled over from on high;
terrestrial and heavenly; temporal and immortal; visible and apprehended by thought; in the middle
between greatness and humbleness; himself spirit and flesh—flesh on account of pride; spirit on account
of Grace: the former, so that he suffer and, suffering, that he remember and be chastened; the latter, so
that he abide and glorify the Benefactor—; aspiring to greatness; here, that is to say, in this life, a living
being which is regulated, and, elsewhere, in the future Age, changed; and—the limit of the mystery—
being divinized by the tendency towards God’, being divinized, however, in the participation in the

divine illumination and not changed into the divine essence. [5]

Not much more need be said. There is a series of polarities based on the fundamental
polarity of man’s bodily, sensible nature as over against his spiritual, intelligible nature: the
one arises from the dust of the earth; the other from the inbreathing of God.

We see that man is ‘a sort of second world, a small in the large’. This is the notion of man the
microcosm. In the works of St Gregory as they have come down to us, this phrase reads ‘a
sort of second world, in smallness great’. We cannot be sure that this inversion of smallness
and greatness in the description of man is not due merely to the text that St John had before
him, or to other problems in textual transmission, but there is indeed an inversion of the
terms in St John.[6]

The actual concept of man, the microcosm, ‘a sort of second world, a small in the large’, is
most likely taken by St John from St Maximos the Confessor, who in developing his own
doctrine of man’s vocation also quotes in the Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion) 7 part of
this passage of St Gregory, although without the inversion of terms.[7] Man the microcosm is
an extension of the notion of man as the connecting link between the sensible and intelligible
creations: containing in himself both the sensible and intelligible creations, man is a
microcosm, ‘a sort of second world, a small in the large’, one whose role according to St
Maximos is to act as the focal point for the divinization (theosis) of the whole creation. This
notion of man the microcosm is the basis of St John’s own valuation of the contemplation of
man’s own constitution as the highest natural contemplation, that contemplation which was
provided to Adam and Eve by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: man is not merely an
animal, a biochemical system fashioned out of the dust of the earth, but ‘another angel’ who
links the dust of the earth to Heaven.

That man is both ‘dust of the earth’ and ‘another angel’ makes him ‘a mixed pilgrim’. A
pilgrim is going somewhere.

Man was created ‘overseer of the visible creation’. This is much the same language as St
Macrina used concerning the third of the three aspects of the human soul that preserve the
image of God in man. But, according to St John, quoting St Gregory, man is also the ‘initiate
of the creation which is apprehended in thought’, that is, of the intelligible, spiritual creation.
As we have seen, the tradition of the Philokalia construes this to mean not that we can
merely form propositions about that intelligible reality, but that we can attain to intuitive
apprehensions of that intelligible reality. ‘Thought’ here is not to be construed to be ‘reason’
or ‘ratiocination’. For has not St John already discussed the contemplation of God and the
ascent by Adam and Eve in Paradise to the contemplation of God through the contemplation
of his creatures? And has he not in his other writings, notably Barlaam and Ioasaph, painted
an icon of the Hesychast life here on earth after the Fall, which life matches his description of
the life of Adam and Eve in Paradise?
We next see a very important polarity concerning man’s relation to this world: he is ‘king of
those things which are upon the earth, being ruled over from on high’. As concerns the things
of the earth, man is king, but he is a king who is ruled over by the Lord. Both aspects of this
polarity must be preserved. Man has divine authority to rule the earth, but as a vassal of God.
In the Orthodox tradition, this implies that man must subordinate his kingship over the
things of the earth to his spiritual vocation. For fallen man, this means that he must
subordinate his use of the things of the earth to his return to God in dispassion (apatheia)
and contemplation or gnosis of the Lord. The danger in the doctrine of the kingship of man
over the earth arises today because that kingship is divorced, notably in the Protestant
tradition, from the notion of the return to God in dispassion (apatheia): being ruled over by
God is taken to mean the formal profession of the Lordship of Christ without any notion of a
subsequent effort towards purification of the man from the passions, except insofar as
regards adherence to certain external ethical norms, those ethical norms being interpreted
according to the man’s own judgement. This is an extreme religious individualism. Hence,
since the man who has accepted the Lordship of Christ has no obligation to purify himself
from sin except on a simple, external level, he can use the things of the earth with avarice.

Curiously enough, St Augustine, to whom the Reformers turned for inspiration, was himself
clear on avarice (cupiditas) in the use of the material creation as the fundamental motion of
a sinful turning away from God. This is how Gilson puts it:

The exercise of the superior reason is therefore essentially submission of the individual to that which
surpasses him and adherence of the mind (pensée) to the source of light which enlightens all thoughts
(pensées). If we suppose on the contrary that a man opts for the exclusive exercise of the inferior reason,
then he no longer turns towards the Ideas themselves, but towards the changing reflections, that is to
say, towards sensible things, of which he makes himself the master so as to enjoy them and to exploit
them to his own advantage: that is knowledge (science). In a word, in turning us towards the Ideas,
wisdom orients us towards the divine and the universal; in turning us towards things (choses),

knowledge (science) submits us to the created and encloses us in the limits of the individual. [8]

Gilson continues with his paraphrase of Augustine: this movement towards objects is
avarice, the root of every evil, and the source of avarice itself is pride, the beginning of sin.

That is not much different from what St John of Damascus, quoting St Gregory, is saying.
What St Augustine calls the superior reason is what St John is alluding to: man’s acceptance
of the Kingship of God over himself, not only formally as an act of public profession, but also
spiritually, in his everyday life, in the actual ‘submission of the individual to that which
surpasses him and [in the] adherence of the mind (pensée) to the source of light which
enlightens all thoughts (pensées)’. What St Augustine calls the inferior reason is the kingship
of man over ‘those things which are upon the earth’. While St Augustine strongly emphasizes
the superior reason, man in this life indeed must make use of the things of the earth, but in
the context of a turning to the things of God. Here, as we have said, the problem in the
Protestant tradition is a limited notion of the things of God: the formal acceptance of the
Lordship of Christ and the adherence to certain external ethical norms subjectively
interpreted. Hence, the field is open to a rapacious exploitation of the things of this world,
and to a complete turning of the spirit to the things of this world, much as St Augustine
describes with his phrase ‘the inferior reason’—and all of this with a clear conscience.

St John, still quoting St Gregory, continues his text with a series of polarities based on man’s
dual nature: ‘earthy and heavenly; temporal and immortal; visible and apprehended by
thought’. These notions are similar to the notions of St Macrina concerning the nature of
man that we saw in Chapter I. Note that the clarity of St John’s and St Gregory’s thought
depends on the idea that man has two natures: the earthy, sensible nature of the body and
the spiritual, intelligible nature of the soul. There is no sense in St John of Damascus,
quoting St Gregory the Theologian, of the confusion of these two aspects of man that would
be brought about by treating the inbreathing of God into Adam’s earthy body as a holistic
phenomenon: St John and St Gregory are clear: the earthy, sensible nature is the body
fashioned from the dust of the earth; the spiritual, intelligible nature is the soul conferred on
Adam by the inbreathing of God.

St John, still quoting St Gregory, now draws his conclusions: Man is ‘in the middle between
greatness and humbleness’. What do St John and St Gregory mean? Man’s greatness arises
from his spiritual nature, from his partaking of and manifesting the invisible creation to
which he is linked by his soul. Man’s humbleness, however, arises from his earthy nature,
from his partaking of and manifesting the visible, material creation to which he is linked by
his body. Hence man is ‘in the middle between greatness and humbleness’ because he links
the spiritual and material creations in his own duality of being: he is both ‘spirit and flesh’.
Why was he made thus? He was made ‘flesh on account of pride; spirit on account of Grace:
the former so that he suffer and, suffering, that he remember and be chastened; the latter so
that he abide and glorify the Benefactor’. The earthy body is both man’s humbleness—for he
is dust of the earth—and his means of attaining humility: he was made ‘flesh on account of
pride’, that is, so that he humble himself on account of the dust of the earth that he is and so
that he not be puffed up by his kingship over the things of the earth and by his spiritual
grandeur as the connecting link between the sensible and intelligible creations. That is why
he was made flesh, ‘so that he suffer and, suffering, that he remember and be chastened’, in a
word, that he be humbled. Note that this applies to Adam and Eve in Paradise but surely also
to man today in his condition after the Fall.

But man was also made ‘spirit on account of Grace … so that he abide and glorify the
Benefactor’. There are two things: the humility of the dust of the earth and the spiritual
grandeur of him who is spirit and who is able to ‘abide and glorify the Benefactor’.

We can say without equivocation that this image of man has been lost in the West today. For
the relation to the flesh is all, even in America where virtually the populace itself confesses
the Lordship of Christ.

Moreover, the fundamental problem in bioethics is dying: while it is natural and normal for
medicine to prolong life, the prolongation of earthly life has become all: for the spiritual
dimension of man’s life having been lost in the West, it is ‘imperative’ for fleshly death to be
conquered and for earthly life to be prolonged to the Age.

How does St John, still quoting St Gregory, see this? Man is ‘here, that is to say, in this life, a
living being which is regulated, and, elsewhere, in the future Age, changed’. Man starts on
earth ‘a a living being that is regulated’ by God, but he is a ‘mixed pilgrim’, and when he dies
his fleshly death, he dies in the hope that in the future Age he will be changed. ‘Future Age’
has two senses here: In the one sense, the ‘future Age’ is the condition of man after death, in
Heaven. In the other sense, it is man’s condition after the General Resurrection, when he will
be changed ‘in the blink of an eye’ (1 Cor. 15, 52). As St Paul himself says:

It [i.e. the body] is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in

infirmity; it is raised in power; the natural (psuchikon) body is sown; the
spiritual (pneumatikon) body is raised. There is a natural (psuchikon) body;
 there is a spiritual (pneumatikon) body. Thus also it has been written: ‘The first
man Adam became unto a living soul;’ [cf. Gen. 2, 7] the last Adam unto a
vivifying spirit. But the spiritual (pneumatikon) is not first, but the natural
(psuchikon), then the spiritual (pneumatikon). The first man was from the
earth, made of dust; the second man, the Lord from Heaven. As the man of dust
was, so are those who are of the dust; and as the heavenly man is, of such a kind
will also be those who are heavenly. And just as we wore the image of the man of
dust, so also we shall wear the image of the heavenly man.[9]

How does St John of Damascus himself express this mystery? He continues with the last part
of his quotation from St Gregory the Theologian: ‘and—the limit of the mystery—being
divinized by the tendency towards God,…’. However, St John then adds his own phrase to
clarify the nature of the divinization to which St Gregory is referring: ‘…being divinized,
however, in the participation in the divine illumination and not changed into the divine
essence’. This is the mystery of which St Paul is speaking. St Paul is referring particularly to
the mystery of the General Resurrection, but the mystery of divinization (theosis) begins in
Baptism, in this life. In the spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church, the mystery of
divinization (theosis) comprises three phases: It begins in this life on earth at Baptism, in
much the same way that we have seen Gilson to present St Augustine: man turns to God and
submits himself by the superior reason to the divine illumination, turning away from the
occupation of the inferior reason with the things of the earth. Of course, the Orthodox
tradition of the Philokalia has its own language and doctrine. The next phase is the phase of
man in Heaven after death. The third phase is the phase of man after the General
Resurrection. While the context suggests that St John sees divinization (theosis) as taking
place in the ‘future Age’ of Heaven or of the General Resurrection, divinization (theosis) has
always been seen in the Orthodox spiritual tradition as something beginning right here on
earth at the time of Baptism, and not as something reserved for the future Age alone.

Note St John of Damascus’ own phrasing: ‘divinized … in the participation in [or, ‘of’] the
divine illumination’. Nowhere do the Greek Fathers speak of a vision of the essence of God.
Moreover, St John speaks of the ‘divine illumination’. It is this divine illumination which is at
the heart of divinization (theosis), at the heart of the Philokalia. It is this divine illumination
by the uncreated operations (aktistes energeies) of God that is the goal of the method of
spiritual ascesis of the tradition underlying the Philokalia.
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[1] Homily 38, 11: Migne 36, cols. 321B–D; = Homily 45, 7: Migne 36, cols. 629C–32A.

[2] Exposition, II, 12—Damascus p. 75, l. 9–p. 76, l. 23. In the first sentence of the second paragraph of this passage,
St John is closely paraphrasing St Gregory from the continuation of the passage of St Gregory that he is quoting. In the
second sentence of his second paragraph, St John is glossing St Gregory to explain the difference between the kat’
eikona and the kath’ homoiosin. His third paragraph is his own.

[4] In ST Ia, 118, 1 and 118, 2, ad 2: see Chapter IV.

[5] Exposition, II, 12, cont’d.—Damascus p. 76, ll. 24–36. The passage in quotes continues the quotation from St
Gregory the Theologian referenced above.

[6] The lacuna which in St John’s quotation immediately follows is of no importance, being a matter of a connecting
phrase.

Chapter V -- 3

Let us see how St John continues, no longer quoting St Gregory the Theologian:

He, then, made him a sinless nature and a will which was self-ruled (autexousion). I say ‘sinless’, then,
not as ‘not being receptive of sin’ (for only the Divine is not receptive of sin), but as ‘not having it in his
nature to sin, but rather in his deliberate choice’, that is, having the authority to abide and progress in
the good, working together with the Divine grace, and similarly also to turn from the good and to come
to be in the evil, God permitting these things on account of the self-rule (autexousion); for that which

occurs by violence is not virtue.[1]

Here St John is saying that it was not in man’s nature that on account of his nature he
necessarily sin: sin arises from the self-rule (autexousion)—free will, free decision, deliberate
choice—which is an inalienable characteristic of man, one which preserves in him the image
of God; sin does not arise from the very nature of man. St John describes having this self-
rule as ‘having the authority to abide and progress in the good, working together with the
Divine grace, and similarly also to turn from the good and come to be in the evil’. This is a
doctrine that man can choose to abide in the good, working with God, or choose to turn away
from God and to come to be in evil. There is nothing here of a doctrine that the human will
necessarily tends to its final end, beatitude, the Beatific Vision, or that the human will is an
appetite which necessarily tends to an end, the good—although, as we have seen in Chapter
IV, St John does, following Aristotle, define the will as an appetite. However that definition
of the will as an appetite must be understood in the context of St John’s doctrine of the
absolute freedom of man to choose either to abide in the good or to come to be in the evil.
‘For that which occurs by violence is not virtue.’ God gave man this freedom so that man’s
virtue might be a free act of love towards his Creator. We think that this is a sounder doctrine
than that of St Thomas Aquinas.

The next passage of St John of Damascus is important:

The soul, therefore, is a simple, living substance (ousia zosa aple); bodiless; in its own familiar nature
invisible to the bodily eyes; both rational and spiritual (logike te kai noera);(aschematistos); making
use of an organic body and able to provide this with life, increase, sense-perception and generation; not
having the mind (nous) something different than itself, but having it the part of the soul which is most
pure (for just as the eye is in the body, thus is the mind (nous) in the soul); self-ruled (autexousios);
having will and action; mutable, that is, changeable according to the movements of the will—for it is
created—: all these things according to nature having been received from the grace of him who created

the soul, from which grace it also received both being and being thus according to nature. formless [2]

This definition of the soul is quite similar to the definition provided by St Macrina in On the
Soul and the Resurrection that we saw in Chapter I. The probable line of transmission of this
definition is from St Gregory of Nyssa to St Maximos the Confessor to St John of Damascus.
Note the description of the soul as a ‘simple, living substance’. It is the soul, in this
definition, in this tradition, that provides life to the body, not the chemical reactions of the
body that provides life to the ‘soul’.

The soul is both bodiless and in its own nature invisible to the bodily eyes. We have already
seen these characterizations: St Thomas told us that the soul was bodiless; St Macrina taught
us that it was intelligible and therefore invisible to the bodily eyes. For St John of Damascus,
however, as we shall see below, ‘bodiless’ is a relative term with respect to the immateriality
of the soul, just as it is with respect to the immateriality of the angels. Of course the soul is
‘formless’: it does not have a shape. However, we have already remarked in the previous
chapter that some Elders with the gift of clairvoyance say that the soul has the same form as
the body, as is also taught in the Spiritual Homilies of St Makarios. Since the gift of
clairvoyance is not a matter of the bodily but of the spiritual eyes, this does not necessarily
fly in the face of St John’s definition: as will be seen below, the soul is only in a relative sense
‘formless’.

‘Making use of an organic body’: this ambiguous phrase can also be rendered ‘making use of
the body as a tool’. In the first case, St John is merely stating that the body is biological. In
the second case, St John is opting for a Platonizing description of the relation between soul
and body as being the relation between an artisan and his tool, as we discussed in the
previous chapter. This second interpretation accords with what St John says further on. It is
quite possible of course that St John means ‘organic body’ in the biological sense even while
adopting a Platonic interpretation of the relation between soul and body.

The soul is able to provide this body with life, increase, sense-perception and generation. The
reader may recall from previous chapters that these were the Aristotelian categories of the
vegetative and animal souls that both St Macrina and St Thomas discussed. Here St John of
Damascus is simply saying that the human soul provides all of these operations to the body.
This is much the same as St Thomas Aquinas’ own doctrine in the Summa, although St John
never descends to the level of detail of St Thomas.

However, the soul is ‘both rational and spiritual’. This is the essentially human aspect of the
soul of man. Moreover, it is clear that St John of Damascus does not limit himself to St
Thomas’ notion that in this life man can only know intelligible realities by means of
ratiocination working with propositions based on concepts abstracted from sense-
perception: the word ‘spiritual (noeros)’ conveys the distinctively spiritual aspect of man—
what we have ourselves called his capacity intuitively to apprehend intelligible realities,
including God himself; what St Augustine called the intelligence or intellect or superior
reason. That this is so can be seen from the fact that St John proceeds to describe the mind
(nous) of man as the eye of the soul. Surely this implies more than the power of reasoning
with propositions, more than the power to intuit that that the whole is greater than the part,
that the law of the excluded middle is valid and that there is a law of cause and effect. There
is no sense in St John—given his emphasis in his description of the life of Adam and Eve in
Paradise, how could there be?—that ‘noeros’ is limited to ratiocination, and that ‘logiken te
kai noeran’ is merely pleonastic: man has both reason and the natural power intuitively to
cognize both God himself and his ‘intelligible effects’—although surely by grace.[3]

Note the very important remark of St John of Damascus concerning the relation of mind
(nous) to soul (psuche). As we have seen, for St John the image of God is found in the whole
soul, not just in the mind (nous). Although a good case can be made that St John of
Damascus’ definition of the soul derives from St Gregory of Nyssa by way of St Maximos the
Confessor, here, St John departs from the Nyssian (and Thomist) notion that the most
distinctively human part of the soul, the only part of the soul which is characteristically
human, is the mind (nous): for St John, the mind (nous) is the most pure part of the soul, the
eye of the soul, but the soul itself is a unity which taken as a whole bears the image of God.
The reader might recall that St Thomas posited that after death man loses, at least
provisionally, the lower non-intellectual functions of the soul, those that depend on the body,
and that St Gregory of Nyssa had a similar doctrine that the lower functions of the soul were
merely a certain enlivening operation honoured with the name of soul. St John does not have
such a doctrine: for him the soul, which is both rational and spiritual, is a simple substance,
and the most pure part of it, its eye, is the mind (nous). The difference between St John of
Damascus and St Thomas Aquinas on this point can be construed to be a matter of the
adoption by St John of Damascus of a more Platonic conception of the soul than that
adopted by the more Aristotelian St Thomas. In the case of the difference between St John of
Damascus and St Gregory of Nyssa, the difference seems to be due to the simpler analysis
conducted by St John of Damascus: it may be that St John is writing for a simpler audience
and that he has no real difference from St Gregory of Nyssa.

It would be fair to say that St John of Damascus’ definition of the soul entered into the
Orthodox tradition as the received definition of the soul, including that aspect of the relation
of mind (nous) to soul (psuche).

St John continues that the soul is self-ruled: man has free will. Moreover, the soul also has
action. We have in Chapter IV already discussed St Thomas Aquinas’ very detailed analysis of
human action. St John himself does not provide in the Exposition such a detailed analysis of
human action; we quoted the most important part of his analysis in Chapter IV, the part that
deals with the will, with deliberation and with opinion.[4]

St John then makes some important philosophical remarks. The soul is mutable. This is
important for the convert’s understanding of the nature of Baptism: although he is renewed
in the salvific waters of Baptism, his soul is mutable: he cannot remain static: he must go
forwards or back. This is also important for an understanding of the day-to-day vicissitudes
of the spiritual struggle: some days are easy; some days are not; that is because the soul is
intrinsically mutable. Of course by nature some people’s souls are more mutable than
other’s. This mutability of the soul St John assigns to two causes: to the free will of man and
to the fact that the soul is created. Only God is immutable. This was one of the foundation-
stones of St Augustine’s own theology.

Finally St John remarks that the soul is what it is because of the grace of its Creator, who
both gave it being, and being what it is in its nature. This is the mystery of existence: a child
confronts the mystery of his own consciousness; he wonders how he came to exist: God his
Father gave him both being and being what he is in his nature. May the child not forget.

St John of Damascus now explains how we are to take ‘bodiless’, ‘invisible’ and ‘formless’:

We understand the expressions ‘bodiless things’ and ‘invisible things’ and ‘formless things’ in two ways.
First, those things which are so according to their substance; second, those things which are so
according to grace. Moreover, those beings which are so by nature; and those beings which are so in
respect of the grossness of matter. Therefore, with regard to God, these things are said to be so by
nature; with regard to angels, demons and souls, these things are said to be so by grace, and that in

respect of the grossness of matter.[5]

God has the characteristics ‘bodiless’, ‘invisible’ and ‘formless’ by nature; angels, demons
(fallen angels) and souls have them by grace, and that in reference to the grossness of matter,
not absolutely. This doctrine is usually expressed nowadays by the remark that angels,
demons and souls are considered by the later Greek Fathers to be semi-material, although St
John himself does not use that expression. It would be possible for a clairvoyant Elder to see
a soul.
St John continues with some basic Aristotelian philosophy, which we omit. He then turns to
a discussion of the relation of man, according to his dual nature, both bodily and spiritual, to
the different orders of creation:

It is necessary to know that man communicates with those creatures that are without souls and
participates in the life of those creatures that lack reason and shares in the intelligence or thought
(noesis) of those that have reason. For he communicates with those creatures that are without souls
according to his body and according to its constitution from the four elements; with the plants, then,
according to these aforementioned things and according to the power of nutrition and increase and
procreation, that is to say generation; with the irrational animals, then, in these very aforementioned
things, but, over and above them, according to appetite, that is to say temper (thumos) and desire

(epithumia), and according to sense-perception and according to movement according to impulse. [6]

This, of course, is Aristotle’s psychology, and we have seen it both in St Macrina’s adaptation
of Aristotle’s psychology to the Genesis account of creation and in St Thomas Aquinas’ more
frankly Aristotelian account of the nature of man.

From the point of view of the Christian doctrine of the relation of man to the findings of
modern science, it is important to grasp that already in the Eighth Century in St John of
Damascus, it was understood, following Aristotle, that man communicated with—shared in
the nature of—lifeless creatures such as stones and rocks and running water and fire and
winds by virtue of his being a creature with a body. Nothing in the findings of modern
science would disturb these men. That they speak of four elements does not change their
point of view: as many elements as there might be, following as many laws of physics and
chemistry as there might be, man participates in this order of creation with all the other
bodily creatures, both living and lifeless, by virtue of his body and by virtue of its constitution
from those elements. Moreover, man participates with the plants in the basic functions of
nutrition, growth, and reproduction. He also participates with the irrational animals in
having temper, desire, sense-perception and voluntary movement from place to place.

St John later turns to the characteristics of the soul:

The proper characteristics of the soul are piety, and intelligence or thought (noesis). The virtues are
common to the soul and to the body, these very things, the virtues, also having their point of reference in

the soul, since the soul uses the body. [7]

The characteristics which apply especially to the soul are ‘piety, and intelligence or thought’.
[8] The virtues are common both to the soul and to the body, but the virtues have their point
of reference in the soul just as piety and intelligence or thought do, since the soul makes use
of the body. We can see here that St John does have a Platonic notion of the relation of the
soul to the body, that the soul uses the body as a tool. It would be fair to say that this notion
has passed into the Orthodox tradition as the received understanding of the relation between
soul and body.

St John continues, in a passage that we do not quote, that by nature the rational powers of
the soul rule completely over the irrational powers of the soul. Of the irrational parts of the
soul, there are two, one which does not obey reason and one which does. The part of the soul
which does not obey reason, St John describes in this way: the vital, or pulse, functions; the
procreative, or generative, functions; and the vegetative, or nutritive, functions. The part of
the soul which does obey reason is the desire (epithumia) and the temper (thumos). The
irrational part of the soul is commonly called, says St John, the passionate part of the soul or
the appetitive part of the soul. We have already seen these Aristotelian distinctions in
Chapters I and II in St Macrina’s psychology, in Chapter III in Evagrius Pontikos’
psychology, and in Chapter IV in St Thomas Aquinas’ psychology. It would be reasonable to
say that St Thomas’ description of these powers of the soul could in its broad outlines be
accepted as expressing the Orthodox tradition, although his treatments of cognition and of
the passions surely diverge from the Orthodox tradition.

St John of Damascus then proceeds to discuss within a roughly Aristotelian framework the
details of human psychology. In Chapter IV, above, we quoted part of St John’s discussion,
that on will, deliberation and opinion. In his psychology, St John is neither so rigorously
Aristotelian nor so detailed as St Thomas Aquinas. Moreover, since the authors we will be
dealing with in the rest of this study do not dwell on the additions of Aristotle to the Platonic
tripartite soul of man (mind, temper and desire), the only thing which need detain us is St
John’s treatment of free will in Chapter II, 25.[9] In brief, St John does not consider God to
be the author of man’s actions, since God is only the cause of substances and of Providence
and since it would be absurd to ascribe man’s bad actions to God; moreover, St John does
not accept a variety of other causes such as Fate or Chance as determining man’s actions. The
only possible explanation, says St John, is that man himself is the author of his own actions
in virtue of the self-rule that he has. Note that there is no notion in St John, who also was an
Aristotelian philosopher, which corresponds to St Thomas Aquinas’ very detailed theory of
the nature of the human will as a power which is set in motion by God, the universal cause,
and which necessarily tends towards the Beatific Vision, but to which the intellect presents
its secondary object, which secondary object itself has a metaphysical relation of goodness to
the final end, the Beatific Vision. These doctrines must be considered to be the doctrines of
St Thomas Aquinas, and that in view of the fact that St Thomas was adapting St Augustine’s
psychology to the metaphysics of Aristotle.[10]

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[1] Exposition, II, 12, cont’d.—Damascus p. 77, ll. 36–43.

[2] Exposition, II, 12, cont’d.—Damascus p. 77, ll. 44–52.

[3] The phrase ‘rational and spiritual (logike te kai noera)’ is found in St Gregory of Nyssa (Making G p. 45, l. 16; =
Migne 44, col. 176D) and also several times in the Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion) of St Maximos the Confessor
(E.g. Ambigua 7: Migne 91, col. 1092B): it may be that St John of Damascus has taken the phrase from St Maximos.
Moreover, we saw in Chapter III that the phrase is the underlying Greek of a phrase used in Anathema 9 of the Fifth
Ecumenical Synod, where the use of the phrase is clearly connected to a technical theological description of Christ’s soul.

[8] We have used the two English words ‘intelligence’ and ‘thought’ to translate the somewhat ambiguous Greek word
noesis.

[10] St John of Damascus would never have read St Augustine, since his works had not yet been translated into Greek

Chapter V -- 4

We now wish to turn to man’s vocation.

We have seen St John of Damascus’ description of the condition of Adam and Eve in
Paradise before the Fall. There we saw that Adam and Eve were created in the image and in
the likeness of God, and there we saw detailed descriptions of Adam and Eve’s life in
Paradise which we ourselves remarked were not only descriptions of what has been lost by
Adam’s descendants in the Fall of Adam, but also descriptions of the ideal to which Adam’s
descendants might now attain both in this life and in the next: certainly the fullness of
divinization (theosis) is attained not in this life, nor even in the next life, Heaven before the
Resurrection, but after the General Resurrection. However, the foundation of the tradition of
spirituality which we will address in the next two volumes is that man can in this life begin—
and indeed must begin—the upward ascent towards God, the upward ascent towards his own
divinization (theosis).

Let us now look at how this ascent is viewed from within the tradition of the Philokalia.

One of the authors represented in the Philokalia, St Diadochos of Photike (c.400–a.486),

wrote a work called the Gnostic Chapters[1] which is quoted in On Sobriety, the work from
the Philokalia that forms the subject of Volume III of this study. While the quotations from
the Gnostic Chapters found in On Sobriety are not significant in themselves, they
demonstrate a connection between the two works.

In several chapters of the Gnostic Chapters, St Diadochos discusses the relation between
Baptism and the transformation of the man from the ‘in the image (kat’ eikona)’ to the ‘in the
likeness (kath’ homoiosin)’. In Chapter 78, we find the following:

78 We are in the image (kat’ eikona) of God in the spiritual (noere) movement
of the soul, for the body is just as the house of the soul. Therefore, since through
the transgression of Adam not only the lines of the stamp (charakteras) of the
soul were sullied, but also our body became subject to corruption, on account of
this the Holy Word of God became flesh, as God granting us salvific water
towards regeneration by means of his own Baptism. We are regenerated, then, in
the operation (energeia) of the Holy and Vivifying Spirit by means of the water,
whence we are directly cleansed in both body and soul—if, indeed, a man comes
forth towards God with a complete and undivided disposition—the Holy Spirit
on the one hand dwelling in us, sin on the other hand being expelled by that
 Holy Spirit. For it is not possible, since the stamp (charakteras) of the soul is
one and simple, for two persons [i.e. the Holy Spirit and Satan] to dwell together
in the soul, as certain persons have thought. For when by means of Holy
Baptism, Divine Grace in a certain limitless affection adapts the soul to the lines
of the kat’ eikona in a pledge of the likeness (homoiosis), where can the person
of the wicked one find place, there being, certainly, no communion at all
between light and darkness? We believe, then, we who are the runners in the
sacred contests, that the multiform snake is expelled from the inner chambers of
the mind (nous) by means of the bath of incorruption; and let us not wonder for
what reason after Baptism we again think vicious things together with good
things. For the bath of holiness on the one hand removes from us the stain
which is from sin; it does not on the other hand now change the double nature of
our will, neither does it at all prevent the demons from warring against us, nor
from speaking words of deceit towards us, so that, receiving in the power of God
the arms of righteousness, we preserve those things that we did not guard when
we were earthly [psuchikoi].[2]

In Chapter 4, St Diadochos defines clearly the relation between the kat’ eikona and the kath’
homoiosin:

4 We are all men in the image (kat’ eikona) of God. The ‘in the likeness (kath’
homoiosin)’ is of those only who have through much love (agape) enslaved their
own freedom to God. For when we are not of ourselves, then we are like
(homoioi) him who reconciled us to himself by means of love. A man will not
achieve this very thing except if he persuade his own soul not to be shaken in
regard to the easy glory of this life.[3]

In Chapter 89, St Diadochos describes the ascent from the kat’ eikona to the kath’
homoiosin:

89 Holy Grace, by means of the Baptism of regeneration, procures for us two

good things, of which the one infinitely surpasses the other. But the first is
granted directly: for it renews us in the very water and brightens all the lines of
the soul, that is to say the kat’ eikona, washing off from us every wrinkle of sin.
The second waits so that it might work together with us, which very thing is the
kath’ homoiosin. Therefore, when the mind (nous) begins to taste the goodness
of the Holy Spirit in much perception (polle aisthesis), then we must know that
Grace is beginning to paint as it were the kath’ homoiosin over the kat’ eikona.
For just as painters first delineate the shape of the man with one colour, then,
with colour bit by bit adorning colour, they thus preserve the form of the one
who is being portrayed even up to the hairs—thus also the Grace of God first
regulates the kat’ eikona by means of Baptism to whatever it was when man first
came to be. When, however, Grace should see us desiring from every disposition
the beauty of the likeness (homoiosis) and should see us standing naked and
fearless in the studio of this Grace, then, with virtue adorning virtue, and leading
the form of the soul up from glory to glory [cf. 2 Cor. 3, 18], it procures the
stamp (charakteras) of the likeness (homoiosis) to Grace. For that reason, then,
the perception (aisthesis) declares that we are being formed in the kath’
homoiosin; we will know the perfection of the likeness (homoiosis) from the
illumination (photismos). For the mind (nous), progressing according to a
certain measure and an unspeakable rhythm, receives all the virtues by means of
this perception (aisthesis); one is not able, however, to acquire spiritual love
(pneumatike agape) except if he be illumined with every inner spiritual
assurance (plerophoria) by the Holy Spirit. For if the mind (nous) does not
receive perfectly the kath’ homoiosin by means of the Divine Light, it can have
almost all the other virtues but it remains yet without a share in perfect love. For
when a man is made like to the virtue of God—as man is able to be made like to
God, I say—then he also bears the likeness (homoiosis) of the divine love. For as
in the case of those who are portrayed, the whole adorning colour of colours,
added to the image, preserves the resemblance of him who is portrayed, thus
also in the case of those who are again painted by Divine Grace in the divine
likeness (homoiosis), the illumination (photismos) of love once added declares
the kat’ eikona to be completely in the dignity of the kath’ homoiosin. For
neither can any other virtue procure dispassion (apatheia) for the soul except
love alone. The fulfilment of the Law is love. [Cf. Gal. 5, 14.] Therefore, then, our
inner man is renewed from day to day in the taste of love; it is completed,
however, in the perfection of love [Cf. Col. 3, 10].[4]
Let us discuss what is being said.

We will first interpret the literal meaning of the passages and then turn to the broader
spiritual issues.

St Diadochos locates the image of God, the kat’ eikona, in the ‘spiritual (noera) movement of
the soul’. This means just what it means both in St Gregory of Nyssa and in St John of
Damascus: the soul itself of man, and especially the mind (nous) of man, is the image of God
in man. Here we see St Diadochos to adopt a rather Platonic doctrine of the relation of the
soul to the body: the body is just like the house of the soul. We have already in Chapter III
seen this rather Platonic image in Evagrius Pontikos.[5] However, while it is well-known that
St Diadochos was influenced by Evagrius, there is no trace of the Evagrian cosmology in the
Gnostic Chapters, and, indeed, St Diadochos even adopts somewhat different opinions than
Evagrius. Hence, the doctrine that the soul dwells in the body as in a house can be seen as
merely the rather Platonic orientation of St Diadochos, an opinion not much different from
the opinion of St Augustine, who died when St Diadochos was entering adulthood.[6]

We see the Fall of Adam. Eve was deceived by the serpent and Adam by Eve. They fell. We
have implicitly seen in St John of Damascus that their sin was disobedience. Now, here, it is
a matter of looking at the consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve for the entire human
race. As St Diadochos says in Chapter 4, all men bear the kat’ eikona: that was not lost in the
Fall. All men alive are in the image of God. However, St Diadochos says, ‘the lines of the
stamp (charakteras) of the soul were sullied.’ This means that the kat’ eikona was dirtied.
We might say, disturbed, or, following Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), ‘distorted’. Simply put, while
all men on the face of the earth are in the image of God, because of the fall of Adam there is a
basic disturbance in the image. Moreover, St Diadochos says, ‘our body also became subject
to corruption’. We became subject to sickness, ageing and death. God had said to Adam and
Eve that they would die with death in the day that they ate of the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge,[7] and part of that death is the subjection of our body to corruption. All men die.
All men grow ill. All men experience pain and suffering. This is the human condition. This is
over and above the kath’ homoiosin that Adam and Eve lost, their likeness to God in virtue,
the likeness that gave them their bold familiarity with God.
But ‘on account of this the Holy Word of God became flesh.’ Why? So that he might undo the
damage wrought by Adam and Eve’s disobedience. How? ‘[A]s God granting us salvific water
towards regeneration by means of his own Baptism.’ This is not to be construed as a doctrine
intended to replace the doctrine of the Cross. St Diadochos is merely emphasizing the
sanctification of the waters that Christ accomplished in his own Baptism at the hands of St
John the Baptist in the Jordan, when the Holy Trinity was manifested in the Theophany.[8]
Orthodoxy by no means negates the Cross but it has a more textured theology which includes
the sanctification of the waters by the Christ when he himself was baptized. The Baptism of
Christ sanctifies the waters of our own Baptism.

How does St Diadochos see Baptism? First, we are regenerated in the operation (energeia) of
the Holy Spirit by means of the waters of Baptism, when we are directly cleansed in body and
soul: the Holy Spirit takes up his abode in us, at the same time expelling the Devil. In a very
important passage, St Diadochos adds that Grace, the Holy Spirit, restores the kat’ eikona to
what it was when Adam and Eve were created: Baptism removes the dirt that sullies the kat’
eikona in each man, the disturbance and distortion (‘every wrinkle’) of the kat’ eikona that
every man on the face of the earth has on account of the transgression of Adam.[9] St
Diadochos goes on, however: this restoration of the kat’ eikona and all the other benefits of
Baptism constitute the pledge of the kath’ homoiosin—the word used is that used for the
pledge of two who have agreed to marry. St Diadochos then emphasizes that the multiform
snake, Satan, is expelled from us by Baptism.[10] Our condition is radically changed in
Baptism: before Baptism, the snake, Satan, dominates our mind (nous), making us unable to
keep the commandments of Christ; however, he is expelled in Baptism by the Holy Spirit
which then takes up its abode in our mind (nous).

St Diadochos makes another important assertion: although the multiform snake has been
expelled in Baptism, let us not wonder why after Baptism we should again have bad
thoughts. For although Baptism does remove the stain of sin—in addition to the restoration
of the kat’ eikona, all our personal sins are completely washed away and forgiven in Baptism
—Baptism does not change the double nature of our will: our will can tend, as we have seen
in St John of Damascus, to good or it can tend to evil: the choice is up to us. Moreover,
Baptism does not prevent the demons from warring against us, nor from speaking words of
deceit towards us: in a word, Baptism does not prevent the demons from tempting us: recall
the immaterial war of the thoughts that we spoke of in Chapter IV, above, when we were
discussing St Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the influence of the emotions on the reason. It is
for us after our Baptism to take up the arms of righteousness in the power of God in order to
keep the commandments of God—of the Old and New Testaments—that we did not keep
when we were earthly (psuchikoi), that is, when we were yet unbaptized.

We here see the fundamental role of Baptism in the Jesus Prayer. We ourselves can only
emphasize this aspect: it would be folly to pursue the spirituality of the Jesus Prayer and the
Philokalia without Orthodox Baptism. In regard to the Jesus Prayer, there are these
important aspects of Baptism: we are completely regenerated in Baptism; our sins are
completely forgiven; the kat’ eikona is restored to its condition as it was at the time of
Adam’s creation by God; Satan is expelled from our mind (nous) and the Holy Spirit takes up
its abode in our mind (nous), so that our mind (nous) is cleansed, enlightened and found in a
new and enduring condition.

In particular, the transformation of our mind (nous) by the personal advent in Baptism of
the Holy Spirit is important in regard to the practice of the Jesus Prayer. The practice of the
Jesus Prayer is called ‘mental prayer’. It is prayer by the mind (nous). It is something
spiritual. It should be evident that we Orthodox have a much broader notion of the mind
(nous) than the capacity to reason with propositions based on concepts abstracted from
sense-perception or the capacity to intuit the validity of the law of the excluded middle.
Moreover, the practice of the Jesus Prayer is not a practice of directed imagination, nor, in
most cases, of directed sentiment or emotion: it is a use of the intuitive powers of our mind
(nous). These intuitive powers of our mind (nous) might best be described as the spiritual
faculties of our soul. But before Baptism we were under the dominion of Satan, while after
Baptism we have been freed from Satan and our mind (nous) has received the indwelling of
the Holy Spirit. This should not be considered to be mere words. We are changed.
Necessarily, if our mind (nous) is under the dominion of Satan, then our use of the Jesus
Prayer will be different than if the Holy Spirit dwells in our mind (nous). This is the flaw in
treating the Jesus Prayer as a mantra: such an approach ignores this aspect of Christian life:
the transformation of the mind (nous) in Baptism through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
In Baptism we are made new creations in Christ.
The Philokalia presupposes these aspects of Baptism when the works in it address the
spiritual ascent by means of the Jesus Prayer. We cannot say what would happen if someone
were to presume to pray the Jesus Prayer without Orthodox Baptism.

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[6] It is known that there was intercourse between Photike, the diocese in Western Greece of which St Diadochos was
bishop, and North Africa, but any theory of a link between St Diadochos and St Augustine would be completely
speculative.

[9] St Diadochos completes his thought on the restoration of the kat’ eikona at the beginning of Chapter 89.

[10] St Diadochos is speaking against the Messalians, an heretical group.

Chapter V -- 5

The next important thing for the spirituality of the Philokalia is the notion that Baptism does
not prevent the Devil from tempting us. Recall that in the ascetical psychology of Evagrius
Pontikos, the beginning of a temptation is the appearance in the ascetic’s field of
consciousness of an image based on one of the eight passions, which image tempts the
ascetic to sin. Here, St Diadochos is explicitly saying that Baptism does not prevent this.
Moreover, he is saying that we retain our duality of will. In technical language, Baptism does
not grant us not to be able to fall, to sin. That is granted only in Heaven and, especially, in
the General Resurrection. Hence, as St Diadochos puts it, after Baptism we are to take up the
arms of righteousness, we who are the runners in the sacred contests. For those who choose
to take up the spirituality of the Philokalia, the arms of righteousness are the methods of
bodily and spiritual ascesis that we will discuss in the rest of this work: first the primary
model of Evagrius Pontikos in Volume II, then the Hesychast model, which includes the use
of the Jesus Prayer, of St Hesychios in Volume III.
It is important to realize that the first recorded reference to the use of the Jesus Prayer is in
the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos, the very work we are now discussing. However, we
will defer until Volume III a discussion of passages of that work which are concerned with
the Jesus Prayer.

In Chapter 4, St Diadochos clarifies the relationship between the kat’ eikona and the kath’
homoiosin. All men have the kat’ eikona. As we have seen however, until a man is baptized,
the kat’ eikona is sullied by the transgression of Adam. Moreover, St Diadochos says, the
kath’ homoiosin belongs only to those who through much love have enslaved their own
freedom to God. Compare the Gospel of John:

Amen, Amen, I say to you, that every man who does sin is a slave of sin. The slave, then, does not remain
in the house to the Age; the son remains to the Age. If, then, the Son sets you free, you will be free

indeed.[1]

What St Diadochos himself means is that since after our Baptism we retain our duality of
will, we must by a free and deliberate choice subject our freedom to God. This is much the
same as St Augustine’s doctrine of the superior reason, of the submission of the higher part
of man’s soul to God. As St Diadochos puts it: ‘For when we are not of ourselves, then we are
like (homoioi) him who reconciled us to himself by means of love.’ When we have given
ourselves completely to God so that we no longer belong to ourselves but to God, who
reconciled us to himself by means of love, then we are in the kath’ homoiosin. But it is
impossible to achieve this unless we fearlessly put off the easy vainglory of the present life.
This emptying of ourselves so that we might enslave our freedom to God is here to be
understood to be the practice of the way of spirituality of the Philokalia. It is not to be
thought of as something apart from, or over and above, that way of ascesis. There is one way
of ascesis for each man, whatever that way of ascesis might be—we are not here asserting
that every man must follow the way of the Philokalia—and the practice of that way is itself
the very act of the man’s giving over of himself to God: if there is a dissonance between the
method of ascesis and the self-giving to God then something is wrong either with the man’s
ascesis or with his approach to God.

In Chapter 89, St Diadochos addresses the relation between the kat’ eikona and the kath’
homoiosin in more detail. After repeating his teaching concerning the acquisition of the
fullness of the kat’ eikona in Baptism, he turns to the acquisition of the kath’ homoiosin.
Now it must be said that we are here quoting a passage of St Diadochos in which he is
discussing not the beginning of the struggle for the kath’ homoiosin but its final stages,
stages to which few men or women attain even in good monasteries in this age. The
beginning of the struggle we will discuss in depth in Volume II. For now, let us see what St
Diadochos says. He says that when the mind (nous) of the ascetic begins to taste the
goodness of the Holy Spirit in much perception (polle aisthesis), then he must know that
Grace, the Holy Spirit, is beginning to fashion the kath’ homoiosin on top of the kat’ eikona,
just as a painter applies his various paints to transform the sketch of a person into a full
portrait. The kat’ eikona that we receive in Baptism is the sketch of the person of Christ, if it
can be put that way, and the kath’ homoiosin is the fullness of the portrait of Christ that we
must become. The sign of the beginning of the acquisition of the kath’ homoiosin is the
‘much perception (polle aisthesis)’ of the goodness of the Holy Spirit. What does this mean?
The ascetic begins to have much spiritual perception—clear intuitive apprehension by his
mind (nous)—of the presence and operation in his soul of the Holy Spirit. For the beginner,
of course, there is a danger here, since he might be tempted by a false advent of the Holy
Spirit. However, let us leave that matter aside, since we will discuss it in the other two
volumes of this study. Once, then, the ascetic begins to have much spiritual perception of the
goodness of the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit itself has begun to fashion the kath’
homoiosin in him. St Diadochos says that the Holy Spirit adorns the virtue of the ascetic with
virtue and leads the ascetic up from glory to glory, thus procuring for the ascetic the stamp of
the kath’ homoiosin, which is the likeness to Grace, to the Holy Spirit. However, that is not
enough for the perfection of the kath’ homoiosin. To reach the fullness of the kath’
homoiosin, the ascetic must attain to ‘illumination (photismos)’.

By means of the much perception, the soul of the ascetic receives, evidently in
contemplation, all the virtues but one: the fullness of spiritual love. That can only be
acquired by illumination (photismos), with every inner spiritual assurance (plerophoria), by
the Holy Spirit. The perfection of the kath’ homoiosin, divine love, is granted by the Holy
Spirit in this illumination (photismos): ‘[T]he illumination of love once added declares the
kat’ eikona to be completely in the dignity of the kath’ homoiosin.’ In a very important
remark, St Diadochos observes that the much perception (polle aisthesis) grants us a taste of
divine love, but that the fullness of this divine love is granted only in the illumination
(photismos).
The dual concepts in St Diadochos of illumination and spiritual perception[2] are very
important. They are found in Homily 7 of the Spiritual Homilies of St Makarios,[3] a source
of St Diadochos.[4]

The importance of the phrase ‘spiritual perception (noera aisthesis)’ can be seen in the fact
that St Gregory Palamas himself uses the expression in Huper ton Hieros Hesuchazonton
(In Defence of Those Keeping Stillness in a Holy Manner) when in his refutation of Barlaam
he is discussing the nature of the spiritual experience of the Hesychast. R. E. Sinkewicz, the
Roman Catholic student of the Hesychast controversy of the Fourteenth Century, implies
that St Gregory Palamas took the phrase from earlier writers, perhaps from St Symeon the
New Theologian, although the phrase itself is earlier in origin.[5] If we consider that the
book that St Symeon’s teacher gave him to read when he was a beginner in the spiritual life
contained the Gnostic Chapters of St Diadochos,[6] then the spiritual genealogy of the
phrase is possibly from the Makarian homilies to St Diadochos to St Symeon to St Gregory
Palamas.

Moreover, the description of the illumination (photismos) by St Diadochos is very similar to

the Hesychast doctrine of the Uncreated Light. For he says: ‘For if the mind (nous) does not
receive perfectly the kath’ homoiosin by means of the Divine Light…’ But that is precisely
what was in question in the Hesychast controversy. Moreover, we will find in Volume III that
St Hesychios has a parallel doctrine of illumination by the Holy Spirit.

We also see that St Diadochos advances a doctrine of dispassion (apatheia). Although, as we

have remarked, St Diadochos is known to have been influenced by Evagrius Pontikos, his
notion of dispassion (apatheia) is not the same as Evagrius’ notion. For it is clear that for St
Diadochos, to attain to dispassion (apatheia) is to attain to the kath’ homoiosin. However, as
we have pointed out previously and as we shall discuss in Volume II, Evagrius’ dispassion
(apatheia) is an intermediate stage of the spiritual journey, not its fulfilment.

We can now see the broad outlines of man’s vocation: it is to be reconciled to God in Holy
Baptism and, having received the restoration of the kat’ eikona, to work to attain the kath’
homoiosin.
[2] In other passages, St Diadochos does use the phrase ‘spiritual perception (noera aisthesis)’; here he is using the
simpler expression ‘perception (aisthesis).

[4] In the particular place of St Makarios cited, the word actually used is ‘perception (aisthesis)’, but this is a minor
difference; the sense in both authors is the same.

Chapter V -- 6

Man was created spiritual. He is both a body and a soul. With the body he belongs to the
material order of creation and is subject to its physical laws just like the rest of the material
creation. With the plants man shares certain basic biological functions such as nutrition,
increase and generation. With the animals, he shares sense-perception, desire, temper and
bodily movement.

With his soul, however, man belongs to the spiritual order of creation and by his soul he was
created in the image of God. The dignity of man’s spiritual nature rests in the particular
nobility of this image of God. In this, man transcends the whole of material creation, being
created, as St John of Damascus says, quoting St Gregory the Theologian, a king over the
material creation, but a king ruled over from on high. Moreover, man, the king, is the
microcosm linking the material and spiritual creations. Indeed, St Makarios in Homily 15
even dares to say that man created in the image and likeness of God was made higher even
than the angels.[1]

Modern science, following the anti-clerical and anti-Christian stance of the Enlightenment,
has rejected the spiritual nature of man. This we have called the materialistic and
mechanistic paradigm of modern biology. The battle between the two views of the nature of
man has been intense since the Enlightenment.

In this work we have passed without comment from the language of science to the language
of revelation as concerns the origin and the nature of man, and it is now incumbent upon us
to explain our point of view.
We take the Genesis account of creation to be the word of God, inspired by God and
expressing certain very profound truths about the nature of existence, the world and man.
That is not to say that we accept the ‘literal inerrancy’ of Scripture in the sense, say, that the
Constitution of the United States of America is a legal document with an ‘inerrant’ legal
application. We believe that the scriptural account of the creation of man conveys certain
very important truths about the nature of man. One of those truths is that man has a
spiritual nature that is not encompassed by the explanations of physics—although in his
body man is subject to all the laws of physics, just as the rocks and the stars are—; that is not
encompassed by the biological explanations of plants and fungi and microbes and viruses—
although, as any textbook of molecular biology will convince the reader, man’s body is
similarly subject to the biochemical laws that govern the nutritive, augmentative and
generative functions that these creatures possess—; and that is not encompassed by the
biological explanations—still rudimentary at the time of composition of this study—of the
functions of the animal nervous system: sense-perception, temper, desire and movement—
although man shares with the dogs and the dolphins and the bears those powers, too.
Something more is involved in man. He is not merely a particularly successful ape. That
something else is expressed with precision in the scriptural account in this way: ‘And God
made man, dust from the earth, and blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto
a living soul.’[2]

As St John of Damascus points out, man is ‘dust from the earth’ because he has a body; he
‘became unto a living soul’ in that the divine inbreathing or insufflation created in him a
‘rational and spiritual soul’ that gave life to that body. In the tradition of the Orthodox
Church, and even, as we have seen, in the West in the theology of St Thomas Aquinas, the
soul is that which gives life to the body: the Orthodox, and even the Roman Catholic,
traditions do not consider that biochemistry itself provides life, although it certainly provides
the material substrate which as body is vivified by the soul of the man. As we have seen,
moreover, the teaching of the Orthodox Church is that both the soul and the body come into
existence at the conception of each man.

The scriptural account and the Orthodox tradition emphasize the dignity of man: whereas for
all the rest of recorded creation, God spoke a word and the thing came to be—whether the
light or the birds of the air or the stars in the sky—, in the case of man, God himself stooped
down to fashion his masterpiece: God himself stooped down to take dust from the earth and
to fashion man’s body. Does this mean that we reject the theory of evolution? No. But it
means that we do not think that the theory of evolution has the status that its adherents
would like to claim for it. A reading of a modern controversialist will convince one that the
theory of evolution—whatever scientific evidence there is for it—is not merely science but
ideology: it is the rallying cry, the banner, for anti-religious sentiment that would allow man
the freedom to pursue his every passion. Hence, it is difficult to speak of the theory of
evolution objectively either from the point of view of science or from the point of view of
religion: the theory of evolution is the litmus test of correctness among biologists; it is their
own criterion of orthodoxy. But this is not science taken to be the dispassionate pursuit of
truth; this is ideological commitment.

What must be understood from the scriptural account of the creation of man is that whatever
relation man has to the rest of the material creation—and the Fathers were not loathe to
adapt the psychology of Aristotle, the great biologist, to the Genesis account of creation in
order to account for man’s relation to the rest of the material creation—, whatever objective
truth there might be in the evidence for the evolution of man, there is something very
different about man, something peculiar: at some point God himself stooped down, ‘took
dust from the earth’ and fashioned man’s body. At some point, God himself intervened in the
‘evolution’ of man, so that man’s body became a fit receptacle for man’s soul, created by God.

And then God ‘blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto a living soul’.[3] Here
we ourselves follow the scriptural account: the peculiarly human aspect of man is due not to
evolution but to the divine inbreathing which made man into an image of God. For it is in the
divine inbreathing that Fathers such as St John of Damascus locate the image of God in man.
Here, we depart from theology as expressed by practising biologists—for their doctrine is no
less theology than our own—and we say that the scriptural account in Genesis of the creation
of man is teaching man something about himself that he would not otherwise learn: that he
was created in the image of God.

These remarks do not exhaust the content of the revelation of God in Genesis. We might
further say that the word of God has been expressed in Genesis so as to contain truths in an
absolute way that is valid in every time and place: whether we read the word of God in
Genesis yesterday or today or here or there, that word conveys an ultimate truth about man’s
nature and about the nature of the world. However, that truth is expressed in a form and
language suitable to its subject: it is not intended to compete with the Newtonian theory of
gravitation or even with the Einsteinian general theory of relativity. These are contingent
human constructs that will pass away the one after the other. The account in Genesis is
intended to convey in every time a truth about God, man, the world and man’s creation.

This is not to say that the Genesis account is a myth. That is already to relativize it, to dismiss
its ultimate applicability to our salvation and to our lives, to make it a plaything for
sociologists. The Genesis account speaks to the soul. It is a story of creation intended to be
read by the wise in understanding, not by the child. It is a story. That story, given that it was
written by God, written many years ago in Palestine, contains elements that bemuse the
modern reader. However, the substance of the story is that God created man out of the dust
of the earth and ‘blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto a living soul’.

The Genesis account is not a story about creation in the sense of how pair formation might
be the means by which fundamental particles came out of nothing. These are theories which
have been advanced and which will be superseded, just as Newtonian mechanics advanced
theories which have since been superseded. Human knowledge is continually an effort to
bring order out of the chaos. It is always incomplete. It is always in process.

We are here not doing physics, nor even theology. The Bible speaks not to the child but to the
wise in understanding. We mean this: the spiritual sense of Scripture is perceived spiritually,
with the illumination that God gives to the mature in the Holy Spirit. This maturity is not
intellectual. It is a matter of the growth of the man in the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox
Church; it is not a matter of Protestant fundamentalist assertions. Hence, the Protestant
fundamentalist asserts the literal inerrancy, the Orthodox the spiritual inerrancy, of
Scripture. There is a difference, as much as Heaven is from the Earth of human thoughts.

Hence, in our view, the inerrancy of Scripture is real, but the sense of Scripture is to be
discerned with the eye of the soul, the mind (nous), illumined by the Spirit of God. And, as
we have seen, as St Barsanuphios has written, no man has the fullness of the Wisdom of God:
every man is deficient in his grasp of the spiritual content of the word of God. We ourselves
are deficient. Having been baptized, we accept the word of God as the inerrant spiritual truth
of creation by God. Moreover, in our view, the best verbal expression of the inerrant truth of
Scripture is precisely the verbal formulation given to that truth by Scripture. For what could
explain more succinctly the nature of man than this: ‘And God made man, dust from the
earth, and blew into his face a breath of life, and man became unto a living soul?’[4]

The soul functions through the body, and if the body is damaged, say in its higher brain
centres, then the soul cannot express itself, without for all that having been lost.

Chapter V -- 7

Let us now turn to the broader spiritual issues. We have seen St John of Damascus’
description of the condition of man in Paradise before the Fall. As we have noted, St John
emphasizes the spiritual aspect of man’s comportment in Paradise: as a spiritual creature
related to the angels, man had as his task in Paradise to be nourished without care by the
contemplation of God himself, having cast all his care on the Lord, hymning as another angel
the glory of God unceasingly and continually.

But Adam and Eve fell.

What were the consequences of this Fall?

As St Diadochos says in one of the passages quoted above:

We are in the image (kat’ eikona) of God in the spiritual (noere) movement of
the soul, for the body is just as the house of the soul. Therefore, since through
the transgression of Adam not only the lines of the stamp (charakteras) of the
soul were sullied, but our body also became subject to corruption…

The kat’ eikona in its essence is something that man did not lose. Adam fell but the essential
‘spiritual (noera) movement of the soul’ remained. Man remains in the image of God.
However, because of the Fall, ‘not only the lines of the character of the soul were sullied, but
also our body fell into corruption’. The falling of the body into corruption is manifested by
the fact that our body is subject not only to death but also to illness and decay. Adam did not
have these things. When the Word of God became man, he was not subject to these things.
Moreover, St Diadochos says, ‘the lines of the stamp (charakteras) of the soul were sullied’.
What this means is that although each man born of woman is in the image of God, that
image is ‘sullied’: each man is born an imperfect image of God his Creator. This position is
midway between a doctrine that man is born intrinsically good, and a doctrine that man
without Grace is intrinsically depraved: man is born in the image of God; that image is
‘sullied’ in its lines by the sin of Adam and Eve.

What can be done?

St Diadochos continues, ‘…[O]n account of this the Holy Word of God became flesh, as God
granting us salvific water towards rebirth by means of his own Baptism.’ Adam fell, and the
Word of God, in his inexpressible compassion for man, took on man’s flesh.

This doctrine is expressed variously: St Athanasios of Alexandria (c.296–373), echoing

Clement of Alexandria, expresses it this way: ‘He [the Word of God] became man so that we
might be made gods.’[1] The Word of God became flesh—incarnated, became man—so that
man, fallen man, man the lines of whose soul in the image of God were sullied by the Fall of
Adam—might be made a god: might attain again to the condition of Adam, might surpass the
condition of Adam. This has never been seen in the Greek Patristic tradition of the Orthodox
Church merely as a matter of the condition of the virtuous man after death—although it is
consummated after death and after the General Resurrection—but as something that begins
even in this life. This is the Orthodox doctrine of divinization (theosis). But as the Greek
Fathers state, and as we have seen St John of Damascus himself emphasize, this is a
divinization (theosis) by participation in the divine illumination, not by attainment to
identity with or equality to the divine essence. For that is impossible for man: it is a
temptation.

Now, as we have already discussed, this divinization (theosis) is attainment to the properties
of God. These properties are called virtues. We have seen St Macrina describe these virtues
as being reflected in a man the way a perfect image of the sun is reflected in a small piece of
glass. And, as we have already seen, these virtues are transmitted to the soul by the Holy
Spirit. Now, following the terminology of St Makarios in the Spiritual Homilies, St
Diadochos will clarify this. But before we discuss this further, let us first turn to another
Father.
St Maximos the Confessor in the Ambigua (Peri Diaphoron Aporion), 3, commenting on a
passage of St Gregory the Theologian, says this on the matter of divinization (theosis):

For the phrase [of St Gregory the Theologian] ‘so that I become God in the same
degree that he became man’ is not for me to say [on account of my weakness] …
but for you [i.e. the recipient of St Maximos’ commentary] who are known in the
perfect restitution of nature from Grace alone, and who are going to attain to
such great power according to this restitution, as much as he who is God by
nature being made flesh partook of our weakness, there being measured again in
return, as he himself knows, in his own emptying (kenosis) the divinization
(theosis) by Grace of those who are being saved, of those who are wholly like to
God (theoeidos) and who have become able to contain all of God and only him.
For this is the perfecting towards which those hasten who believe that this
promise will truly be.[2]

We here see the nature of the doctrine expressed with such succinctness by St Athanasios,
that the Word of God became flesh so that man might be made a god. This is the emptying
(kenosis) that St Maximos is speaking of: the condescension of the Word of God in becoming
man, a man like us in all things but sin.[3] But to the degree that the Word of God emptied
himself, ‘taking the form of a slave’[4]—that is, becoming man—, to precisely that same
degree, man has been enabled by Grace to attain to divinization (theosis): to become ‘wholly
like God (theoeidos)’ and to contain ‘all of God and only him’. This is divinization (theosis).

This containing of God is accomplished first in Baptism, when we receive the Third Person of
the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who thenceforth dwells in the depths of our mind (nous). It
is this Holy Spirit that makes us able to confess the Lordship of Christ, who makes us able to
cry out ‘Abba, Father’ to God the Father.

However, that is the beginning of divinization (theosis). The culmination of ‘the divinization
(theosis) by Grace of those who are being saved’ is ‘to contain all of God and only him’. Now,
as we have said, the fullness of divinization (theosis) is attained after death in Heaven, and
after the General Resurrection. However, it is attainable in part in this life too. St Diadochos
calls this the kath’ homoiosin.
Now we can see what St Diadochos intends us to understand when he says this:

Holy Grace, by means of the Baptism of regeneration, procures for us two good
things, of which the one infinitely surpasses the other. But the first is granted
directly: for it renews us in the very water and brightens all the lines of the soul,
that is to say the kat’ eikona, washing off from us every wrinkle of sin. The
second waits so that it might work together with us, which very thing is the kath’
homoiosin.

(As we saw, St Diadochos begins by asserting that the lines of the stamp of the soul, the
image of God, were sullied by the sin of Adam.)

Grace works with man in a twofold manner. First, immediately in Baptism, the man is
renewed in the water and the ‘lines of the soul’ are restored to the condition of Adam before
the Fall. This is the kat’ eikona. Moreover, the man is washed clean of his every sin. This is
the condition of the baptized Orthodox Christian. The next stage is the attainment to
divinization (theosis). Here, St Diadochos does not use the term divinization (theosis), but
the terms kath’ homoiosin or even dispassion (apatheia). What he is describing is the way in
which divinization (theosis) is attained.

We must draw on St Mark the Ascetic to make the matter clear:[5] In Baptism, we receive
the Holy Spirit integrally into our soul. We cannot lose it. Unless we deny the Lord Jesus
Christ. However, the Holy Spirit is mysterious. It withdraws. Waiting for us ourselves to
make our own choices and our own efforts towards God or away from him. Recall that we
have seen in St John of Damascus that the human will is free and that a man can choose to
do good, with the assistance of God, or to do evil, God permitting this on account of his
respect for man’s freedom of will. ‘For that which is by violence is not virtue.’ St Mark is
somewhat clearer: God is hidden in his commandments, and he is encountered by us
spiritually to the extent that we keep his commandments. Hence, after Baptism, the proper
movement of the Christian is a free choice to submit himself to the Lord, to love the Lord, to
seek after the kath’ homoiosin—and this by keeping the commandments of the Lord: it is this
keeping of the commandments which constitutes the subjection of our freedom to Christ that
we have seen St Diadochos speak of in Chapter 4 of the Gnostic Chapters, quoted above. This
is the heart of the spiritual road of the Philokalia: the keeping of the commandments of
Jesus Christ. There is both no other way, and no easier way, to become like God, to attain to
divinization (theosis), to attain to the virtues, than by keeping the commandments of Jesus
Christ. It is both extremely simple—for babes and not for wise men, this doctrine—and
extremely difficult: we encounter the Lord in the keeping of his commandments.

There is a danger that we will rewrite the commandments of Christ to suit our passions. This
is a danger even among spiritual men just as it is among passionate men. The
commandments are not those that suit our fancy, or our imagination of ourselves as
important spiritual aristocrats, but those which we find in the New Testament. As Jesus
Christ himself says:

Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter into the Kingdom of the
Heavens, but he who does the will of my Father who is in the Heavens. Many
will say to me in that day: ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and
cast out demons in your name and do many great works in your name?’ And
then I will confess to them that I never knew you: depart from me those who
work lawlessness. Therefore whoever hears these very words and does them, I
will compare him to a prudent man who built his house on the rock…[6]

Concerning why keeping the commandments is the way we encounter God, Jesus himself
explains when he himself says:

If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we
will come towards him and we will make a dwelling with him. He who does not
love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is not mine, but
of the Father who sent me.[7]

Hence, the primary movement from the kat’ eikona whose restoration is received
immediately in Baptism to the kath’ homoiosin which is the fullness of the restoration of the
image, the fullness of divinization (theosis), is the keeping of the commandments of Jesus
Christ.
Now we shall see that the way of spirituality of the Philokalia that we are studying in this
work transposes the keeping of the commandments from the realm of the actions of the man
to the realm of the thoughts of the man—and this not because the man is indifferent to his
actions but because, on the one hand, the man has already attained to virtue in his actions, in
his conscious practices, and is seeking a greater perfection, and because, on the other hand,
as St Hesychios emphatically teaches in On Sobriety, if one keeps the commandments in
thought, then it is a trivial matter to keep them in practice, in action. Hence it is by keeping
the commandments first in action and then in thought that we encounter Christ: this is the
doctrine of St Mark the Ascetic; this is the road of the Philokalia.

One might ask, however: but if this is the road of the Philokalia, why have you said nothing
about the Jesus Prayer? Isn’t the Jesus Prayer the Orthodox mantra that makes you divine
without sweat? No. The Jesus Prayer is inserted into an Orthodox tradition of asceticism
oriented to the attainment of the kath’ homoiosin, of divinization (theosis), in the manner
just described, and it cannot be divorced from its context as part of a historical tradition of
asceticism. We do not really discuss the Jesus Prayer until Volume III: Volume II, concerned
with the ascetical system of Evagrius Pontikos, is dedicated not to the Jesus Prayer but to the
keeping of the commandments, first in action but then, especially, in thought.

Let us see how St Diadochos continues his discussion of the attainment to the kath’
homoiosin. He says that when the man has begun to taste the presence of the Holy Spirit in
much perception (polle aisthesis), then he knows that the Holy Spirit has begun to paint the
likeness over the image. St Diadochos’ metaphor is this: the kat’ eikona is the sketch of God
that has been restored to its proper proportions in the man in Baptism. The kath’ homoiosin
is the full-colour portrait of God, divinization (theosis), which the man seeks to attain after
Baptism by the grace of God. When the man begins to perceive spiritually and consciously, St
Diadochos is saying, the activity in himself of the Holy Spirit, then he knows that the Holy
Spirit is beginning to apply the colours that a portrait painter applies to turn a sketch into a
portrait—to turn the kat’ eikona into the kath’ homoiosin.

Now, in the tradition of the Philokalia, there is a precision to be made: what St Diadochos is
referring to occurs at a very high stage of natural contemplation. Before that, according to
the ascetical analysis of Evagrius Pontikos which underlies the Philokalia, there is an earlier
stage. This is the ‘practical life’, in which the ascetic seeks to conquer the moral passions.
This is the battle with the passions. This is precisely the battle to keep the commandments
first in one’s actions and then in one’s thoughts.

The reader may recall Chapter 25 of the Gnostic, quoted above, where Evagrius Pontikos says
that the young and those who are combated by the passions should be kept away from books
on gnosis because there is no discharge in the day of battle. What is meant is this: After
Baptism, yes, the kat’ eikona has been restored, and we have been renewed and washed clean
of sin. However, that does not mean that our passions have left, nor that we cannot be
tempted. Hence, we must begin to keep the commandments—in our actions, surely, but, in
the case of the ascetic following the tradition being discussed, also or even chiefly in thought.
This is the battle to which Evagrius is referring in the passage cited. And Evagrius is saying
that when one is fighting this battle, one should not meddle with the higher spiritual stages
of natural contemplation and Theology. Now this battle of the passions, this battle to keep
the commandments first in practice and then in thought, has an end: the attainment to the
virtues and the emptying of the passions: this is dispassion (apatheia) in the specific sense
that Evagrius Pontikos himself gives to the term, a sense that we will study in Volume II.

In the tradition of the Philokalia, the passage from the kat’ eikona to the kath’ homoiosin is
analysed, according to the model of Evagrius, into three stages, the first of which is the
struggle against the passions and for the virtues, and for the attainment to Evagrian
dispassion (apatheia). This is the keeping of the commandments, first in action and then,
especially, in thought. This stage is called praktike, the practical life. The Ladder of Divine
Ascent of St John of Sinai is much concerned with this stage for the monk living in the
cœnobium, the monastery of many living together under a common abbot and spiritual
father.

After this stage come two other stages, which Evagrius calls natural contemplation and
Theology, or the contemplation of God. St Diadochos, when he discusses the spiritual
perception (noera aisthesis) of the Holy Spirit is discussing the higher stages of natural
contemplation. He is taking for granted—for he himself had read Evagrius—the practical life,
the struggle against the passions. And he is saying that when in the higher stages of natural
contemplation the Holy Spirit begins to be perceived spiritually in its actions in the man,
then the kath’ homoiosin is beginning to be painted by the Holy Spirit over the kat’ eikona.
The man is beginning to approach the ‘perfect restitution of nature from Grace alone’, to use
the language of St Maximos.

Now St Diadochos’ point is this: the spiritual perception (noera aisthesis) of the operation of
the Holy Spirit in the man is not enough for the kath’ homoiosin to be painted in its fullness
over the kat’ eikona. The ascetic’s spiritual perception (noera aisthesis) of the operations of
the Holy Spirit in himself, to which he has attained by grace by his keeping of the
commandments of Jesus Christ, is not sufficient for divinization (theosis). Something else is
required. What?

It is illumination (photismos). Here we encounter in a text written c.450 the Orthodox

doctrine of the vision of the Uncreated Light. This is the illumination (photismos) to which
St Diadochos is referring. And he makes a very interesting remark: it is only by this
illumination (photismos) that the man attains to that final virtue which puts the finishing
touch on the portrait of God, on the kath’ homoiosin, on divinization (theosis): divine love.
This illumination (photismos), in the terminology of Homily 7 of St Makarios, is higher than
spiritual perception (noera aisthesis), although both are matters of grace and not of specific
ascetical practices: it is by keeping the commandments, first in action and then in thought,
that we encounter Christ and that the Holy Spirit which was given to us in Baptism is
manifested to us in conscious fullness.

But it must be understood that what is in issue is not a sensible experience, as the word
‘perception (aisthesis)’ might lead one to assert, but a matter of the higher spiritual faculties
of the human soul, what we have described as the human soul’s capacity for intuitive
cognition. In this the doctrine of the Philokalia is similar to that of St Augustine, who
asserted the existence in man of a higher faculty of intuitive cognition which he called the
intelligence, intellect or superior reason.

Hence, in the doctrine of St Diadochos, illumination (photismos) by the Divine Light, the
Holy Spirit, is the consummation of the attainment to Diadochan dispassion (apatheia), of
the attainment to the kath’ homoiosin, of the attainment of divinization (theosis). This
illumination (photismos) constitutes the attainment to unitive prayer to God, which Evagrius
Pontikos himself calls Theology. St Hesychios speaks in very similar terms of this
illumination in On Sobriety.
The naked doctrine of St Athanasios that the Word became flesh so that we might be made
gods is analysed into a path of asceticism by the ascetical authors in question, all of whom
are represented in the Philokalia. It is with this path of asceticism that we are concerned.