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Commentary 3 - Triads Intro 2 |
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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’.
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