·         The book is important to the churches, because it gives us a way of answering questions about the causes of the loss of faith in our times.

·         It is psychologically important in many ways, therapeutic as well as theoretical, but particularly because it points to ways once known of integration, or as Jung would call it, individuation, of the human psyche.

·         It is philosophically important, because it provides a number of answers that have been lost for many centuries, including ‘new’ or long-lost answers to the classical questions of philosophy.

·         And, as we will slowly come to realise, for us today, it is historically and socially important for all these reasons.

THE LANGUAGE OF STILLNESS: NOUS AS THE STILL AND SECRET SELF

Throughout all this we find a common thread based on a concept almost entirely lost in the West for near a thousand years. (For it was lost in many places even before Palamas began to write this book.) This thread is the consistent and appropriate rendering of the classical Greek word ‘nous,’ a word which at that time, and in the psychological context, had a single clear meaning. This meaning has long been forgotten and today this important word has been translated in many different ways: it is given as the French ‘esprit,’ normally translated in English as ‘mind;’ as Augustine’s Latin ‘intellectus,’ which normally today comes into English as intellect, despite the fact that the modern use of ‘intellect’ is not remotely like the Platonic or Byzantine use of nous. It also appears in the Latin as ‘ratio,’ reason. The Cambridge Platonists spotted this latter, and in so doing uncovered in the Christian thought of the past just that significance of the nous which we find in Palamas and other earlier fathers, a significance which gives the teachings of the fathers a ‘holistic,’ unitive meaning. This is not apparent when ‘nous’ is translated intellect, with its modern connotations of  computer-like processing that are so much more familiar to modern mind. My own experience reveals to me that the meaning of this word changed very much during the last century. The earlier assumption that the proper translation of nous was reason helped to form what is the highest meaning given to reason in the English language. But now, with the assumption perpetrated by supporters of the idea that the human mind that created the computer is nothing more than a computer, intellectual thought is seen as nothing more than an ‘organic’ form of computer process. This has led in our time to a final debasing of the idea of intellect. Thus the nous, as it was understood in the time of Palamas, was nothing like the modern discursive intellect; it was the seat of inspiration and insight, the spotlight of clarity. When ‘magnetised’ by love of God it was the mysterious ‘magnetic centre’ of Russian hesychasm, the Ark of bulrushes and later the Ark of the Covenant of Gregory of Nyssa’s mythical Moses of the mind, the stillness beyond everyday life, the forgotten Place of God of the ancient mystics, with its ‘sapphire pavement’.

  RELYING ON APPEARANCES

The fact that language shapes thought has formed a basis for this translation. The way in which certain words are translated determines how we understand how people once thought. This is important because, in the Western translations of this work that have been available until now, not only nous but certain other Greek words have been given multiple meanings. There were obviously good reasons for these variations: for example, they would fit more easily into modern thought. Yet they also seemed to produce certain confusions in the reader. As we worked on this text, it began to appear that in the Triads these confusions were in fact greater and more significant than is generally recognised. Indeed, it began to appear that the confusion themselves, once understood, were showing us one of the most important conclusions to be drawn from the text: the conclusion that our contemporary thought is different from that of the first Christian millennium in ways that may be of great significance to modern humanity. The divergence in meaning began to appear to be the direct product of a deeper divergence between two very different ways of seeing the world. This difference crystallizes in the way we see the world. It gives the world a very different appearance in the mind.

Under the influence of the normal contemporary Western world-view, the different ways in which certain things appear are taken as if the things themselves are different. Different appearances are mistakenly seen as ‘different things,’ in direct contradiction to the philosophical idea that these differences are not real, but only ‘differences in appearance.’ Such philosophical insights, which helped to shape our civilisation in the past, have little influence over people today. They count for little in a ‘celebrity culture.’ Thus different translations of the word for a ‘single’ thing lead to its appearing as many different things.

This works one way with nous. It now most often appears in translation not as the knowing core of reason but as the everyday thoughts which are its coinage but not its value: its form but not its meaning. It begins to appear as if, in some way, this difference in appearance represents a breakdown, a narrowing, in our ability to understand – not only a limitation in our ability to understand the book, but also in our ability to understand experience. Further enquiry suggests that this was evidence of a conceptual fragmentation symptomatic of a widespread general deterioration in the use of the human mind, and even to suggest certain reasons for this deterioration. It appears more than possible that modern problems such as ADI, (Attention Deficit Disorder,) might directly result from this. In the Greek of Palamas’ time, attention is an action of the nous.

In essence, the unexpected conclusion from the translation of this book was that over the past thousand years or so there had been a general deterioration in our understanding of ourselves and the world, a deterioration in which the vast majority of people had begun to think of things not as they can be understood, but simply as they appear at a cursory glance, taken without intervening thought.

As I hope to show later in a separate book, not only did these factors suggest that the change has been in some ways harmful to our humanity, but they gave pointers to ways in which this damage might be undone. This is one of the reasons for raising this question in such a book as this; to explain that these observations have determined the way in which we have translated certain words, because to translate them in this way provides a number of clues to the deeper meaning of the text. I am already convinced that this deeper meaning has the most practical significance.

  NOUS AND PSYCHE

From the psychological viewpoint, perhaps the most important of these words whose meaning has become fragmented are the two Greek words, nous, and psyche. Among the varied translations of these words are some that are among the most important concepts in contemporary thought. One problem is that these words overlap. For instance, in the French translation of Palamas’ Triads, both psyche and nous are at different times translated by esprit. In English both are given as mind, a common translation of esprit. With ‘mind’ are several other words that are also used to render the Greek psyche: psyche itself, untranslated but taken as the root of psychology, is one. Life is another. and ‘soul’, one of the most imprecise terms in the English language. Together with a third term – life – these present a completely fragmented intellectual picture of the human psyche.

In fact nous, as described by Palamas and the fathers who had gone before him, is not just the ‘psyche’, but the conscious and aware highest part of the psyche: ‘the eye of the psyche’, the long-lost ruling heart of the human mind. It is through the actions of the undispersed and hence unfragmented whole of the nous, and of grace acting through that nous, that: “Man remains wholly man in psyche and body, and through grace becomes wholly God in psyche and body.”

PSYCHE = PSYCHE OR MIND OR THOUGHT

PSYCHE = SOUL

PSYCHE = LIFE

 To understand this word, we have to think about all this very carefully:

1.       Psyche consists of thoughts, feelings, memories, impulses and so on which arise within us and pass through the field of our attention. We experience these things inside ourselves and never outside. Some modern thinkers, like David Bohm, call all of this ‘thought.’ Mind is sometimes taken a synonymous with psyche, sometimes in Cartesian terms, as one side of the ‘mind-body’ problem of contemporary philosophy.

2.       Soul is spoken about in theory, in translations of doctrine, and in myth, but I have never met anyone who was entirely sure in what it was experienced… except as in psyche.

3.       Life exists in every living creature or, in a slightly different way, in plants. Crystals grow too, but we may find it different to be sure that they are alive. The first and most obvious sign by which we recognise life is in movement, including speech. But people also seem to recognise it in the smaller movements within living creatures: in digestion; the circulation of the blood and the movement of other fluids; in the tensing of muscles; in whatever nervous activity is perceptible to us.

As psyche, these three things are one in essence, but taken as appearances they seem to be entirely different one from another. What is interesting about this is that not only do these differences exist in translating one single Greek word. Careful investigation suggests that their different meanings, even in their current form as used today, still refer to one single thing: one thing with many different appearances.

The idea of psyche is retained in English in the context of psychology. But sometimes it is translated into English as mind, or by synonyms of mind. At another time, it is translated as soul.

As I shall show later, in our present age, there is a divergence of sense between these different meanings, based as they are on different appearances.

·         The soul that is the subject of salvation in our ‘theology.’

·         The psyche that is the subject of our psychology.

·         The mind that is the concern of philosophical questions such as the famous ‘mind-brain’ problem.

Perhaps more important, all three different meanings represent three ways in which the original meaning of the concept of psyche has become changed.

The interesting things is that, under three different sets of circumstances, each of these three meanings appears ‘obvious’ or ‘intuitive.’ In a descriptive system built by 'saving the appearances,' the language we now use was in fact formed around these appearances, and not around what they were understood to represent. As a result, each term represents not a different object, but a different ‘appearance’ – each being an appearance of the same ‘reality.’

That divergence between these different meanings of a single word lies like a warning-flag exactly on the primary or most important fault-line that divides our fragmented Western civilisation, just the place where in-depth investigation would be recommended if someone wished to understand and perhaps heal that fragmentation. This is not accidental.

All three different appearances underlie significant misunderstandings that have helped to shape modern life.

All three different appearances relate to a question that was recurrent in philosophy even before the original Greek awakening: Christian doctrine, and in the same way ancient teachings such as the Vedas, are all subject to a particular type of decay. They begin in monastic form, but over the centuries, as they have become diffused, they then become increasingly dualistic, materialistic, and anthropocentric.

 The division in the appearance of the psyche is in part the product of a division in the way we see nous, for a nous divided is division itself, between individuals and between the individual and God. The action of the human nous is found in attention, and the unity of the nous underlies inner and outer perception. But outer is obvious and inner is often ignored, so that this division of meanings becomes attached to a division in our perceptions. All those divisions arise from a division within each human individual, a division between the different appearances of what were once seen as the one thing, nous: appearances in which …

Nous = MIND

Nous = HEART

Nous = INTELLECT

 And with nous, as with psyche, the difference in appearance between these things, leads to a difference in what we believe they are and how we believe they act.

To think about different appearances of one thing as if they represented different things behaving in entirely different ways: what is this if not a serious confusion in our thinking?    

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