In St. Theophan the Recluse's book, The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It (St Paisius Abbey: St. Herman Press, 1995), he early on (Letters 5-14) describes his account of the human person. St. Theophan, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, lived 1815-1894 and is an important example of the faithful transmission of the mind of the Holy Church and the Church Fathers into the modern era. His writings exhibit a deep patristic consciousness, yet also reveal an accurate familiarity with the mind of his (and our) age. His account of the human person is what I will summarize here, as preparation for another couple of posts that are forthcoming (one on energeia and its related words, and one on the passions).
First let me offer this disclaimer: I am no expert on St. Theophan, let alone on patristic anthropology. At most this post is a very simple offering, a summary, of my understanding of St. Theophan. I welcome any criticisms that will keep both me and my readers from straying away from the mind of the Church.
St. Theophan organizes human existence under three aspects: the body (or physical life), the soul (consisting of the intellect, the desiring or active aspect, and the heart), and the spirit (which is the highest aspect of the human person, and encompasses both body and soul). The saint writes:
Human life is complex and multi-faceted. It has physical, mental and spiritual aspects. Each aspect has its power, needs and modes, and the exercise and satisfaction of them. Only when all of our powers are in motion and all of our needs satisfied does a man live. But when only one small portion of his powers is in motion, and only a small number of his needs are satisfied, this life is not life. (p. 38)
He notes that the physical aspect of human existence has three major systems: digestive (here one should think of all the internal organs such as lungs, heart, veins and arteries, ducts, glands, etc.) whose function is the nourishment of the body; musculoskeletal (whose function is movement) and the nervous system (including the brain, spinal cord, and all nerve endings), whose function is sensory perception (cf. p. 46).
The body, however, is not cut off from the soul, which “by virtue of having the closest contact with the body, has become intertwined with it, therefore all the needs of the body are to be considered as its needs, too” (pp. 46-47). Though the body is often equated with carnality, according to the saint,
Only the digestive systems is strongly carnal; but even it is ennobled by the adaptation of its satisfaction to strictly mental needs and purposes. The organs of movement and feeling serve mental needs more than bodily ones. One organ, which stands apart from the system of other organs, the organ of speech is an organ exclusively of the soul, which alone it is intended to serve. (p. 47)
Rather, the things we often associate with carnality and sinful sensuality are really an extreme focus on the things that are necessary with an eye to bodily comfort, or with a forgetfulness of meeting mental, and even more, with spiritual needs (p. 47). But this focus on these things ultimately enslaves us. We are not free, because we are always focused on meeting these bodily needs over against our other needs (p. 48).
The soul has three capacities, each having their own needs and satisfactions: the intellect, desire (or volitional activity, the will), and the heart. Intellect is the home of imagination and memory, reason and logic, thinking things through. The intellect deals with thoughts, concepts, knowledge and cognition as well as opinions and suppositions. It always attempts to organize its thought into ordered bodies of concepts, or various sciences), which is the goal of the intellect—understanding after laboring in thought. But the intellect is also susceptible to wandering thoughts, and daydreams, which frustrates its purposes and lead to confusion and opinions and ignorance. (Cf. Letter 6.)
Desire is the home of the will. Here is the zeal and ardor which originate in the heart (on which more in a moment) which drive desire toward the satisfaction of a need. Desire presents the intellect with a choice as to which of any number of competing objects of desire the person is to pursue. The choice also includes and leads to deliberation about the means of obtaining said object, and this process itself lends itself to habituation and the formation of character. This active life exhibited in desire is designed to be ruled by prudence, the reason of intellect which serves the will. The desiring or active part of the soul is designed toward conducting one's life “sober-mindedly in accordance with the established norm in all its affairs and undertakings” (p. 55). When this end is not met, then there is in this aspect of the soul “inconstancy, disorder, selfish desires, and [the preoccupation with] them” (p. 55). (For this entire paragraph cf. Letter 7.)
The final facet of the soul St. Theophan considers is that of the heart. The heart is the center of one's life.
Everything which enters the soul from the outside, and which is shaped by the intellectual and active aspects, falls into the heart; everything which the soul observes on the outside also passes through the heart. That is why it is called the center of life.The heart's occupation is to sense everything concerning our person. It constantly and persistently senses the condition of the soul and body, and along with this the various impressions from the individual actions of the soul and body . . . . The health and and disease of the body, its vivacity and languor, fatigue and strength, liveliness and lethargy, along with what has been seen, heard, felt, smelled, tasted, and what has been recalled and imagined, what has been done, what one does and intends to do, what has been obtained and is being obtained, what may and may not be obtained, what is favorable to us or unfavorable, whether having to do with a person or concurrence of circumstances—all of this is reflected in the heart, and affects it either pleasantly or unpleasantly. (pp. 56, 57)
But the heart is no mere passive recorder of impressions. It is also an active agent which “maintains the energy of all powers of soul and body” (p. 57). As noted, “Zeal, the motive force of the will, comes from the heart” (p. 58). And the heart is also a place of the battle of the human will with the “alien passions” which “tyrannize” it.
If a person were to always maintain sobriety in his mental part, and prudence in his actions, then he would meet in life only the smallest number of occurrences unpleasant to his heart, and accordingly, would have a greater portion of happiness. But, as has been explained, the mental part rarely maintains itself worthily, giving itself over to idle dreams and distractions, while the active part deviates from its normal bent, being enticed by inconstant desires, which are aroused not by needs of nature, but by alien passions. That is why the heart has not rest, and, as long as these aspects are in such a state, it will not have any. The passions more than anything tyrannize the heart. If there were not passions, it would still meet with unpleasant things, of course, but they would never torment the heart in the same way the passions do. How anger consumes the heart! How hatred tears it! How evil envy grinds! How many disturbances and torments cause discontent or disgraceful conceit! How heavy lies grief when pride suffers! Indeed, if we were to examine a little more stringently, we would find that every one of our disturbances and pains of the heart are from the passions. (pp. 58-59).
(For the above, cf. Letter 8.)
Finally, just as the soul is inextricably intertwined with the body, so the spirit vivifies soul and body, and joins with the human soul. What is the spirit? “It is that force which God breathed into man when He created him” (p. 61). The spirit, since it comes from God “knows God, seeks God, and in Him alone finds rest” (p. 62). This movement toward God is found in three distinct manifestations: the fear of God, that inbuilt awareness that there is a Supreme Being to Whom we owe all our life and love; the conscience, which is the “natural codex of God's commandments” (p. 63), that moral awareness from which humans must deform themselves to ignore; and the longing for God, which is that need manifested in all of us for transcendence and the satisfaction of the divine. The spirit of man is the “distinguishing feature” within us. “The human soul makes us a little above the animals, while the spirit makes us a little below the angels” (p. 63). (For this paragraph cf. Letter 9.)
The spirit influences the soul in each of its aspects. In the intellect, the spirit causes the soul to yearn for the ideal (p. 67). In desire, or the will, the spirit causes the soul to orient itself toward the production of unselfish deeds or virtues (p. 68). And in the sensual part of the soul (that having to do with the heart), the spirit causes the soul to yearn for and to love the beautiful (p. 69). (For this paragraph cf. Letter 11.)
With all this one understands that the human life is hierarchical: the spirit is the highest aspect of life, followed by the intellectual (that is to say, the soul), with the physical occupying the lowest aspect of human existence. But all of these aspects of human life are intertwined, even if hierarchically arranged, and thus comprise some five layers of spiritual life: the spiritual, the spiritual-intellectual, the intellectual, the intellectual-physical and the physical, each giving a certain character to the life of the person whose existence is dominated by one of these layers.
There are five layers in all, but one person in man, and this one person lives first one life, then another, then a third life. Judging by this, a person receives a particular character according to the life he lives, and this character is reflected in his views and attitudes, his habits, and his feelings. That is, his life is either spiritual, with spiritual views, habits and feelings; or it is intellectual, with intellectual concerns, habits and feelings; or it is carnal, with carnal thoughts, deeds and feelings. (I am not taking into consideration the states in between—the intellectual-spiritual, or the intellectual-physical, because I do not want too many categories). This does not mean that when a man is spiritual that the intellectual and physical have no place in him, but only that the spiritual predominates, subordinating to itself and penetrating the intellectual and physical parts. (pp. 71-72)
A person is always free to move into one characteristic state or another of these levels. They are, in themselves, after all, natural to human beings (i. e., the intellectual, physical and spiritual states). However, depending on which state a person has come to be characterized by, it may not be without struggle and much labor that he moves from a carnal character to a spiritual one. However,
The condition that is unnatural, and consequently, is in and of itself opprobrious, is that in which the thoughts stray, steam and seethe, and in which the desires are inconstant, being stirred by the passions. The passions are not natural to us, but alien; and the emotions of the heart are agitated and disturbed by reason of these very passions. (p. 73)
Furthermore, even though the intellectual and physical aspects of human life are natural to us, it does not mean we are guiltless in giving the carnal or intellectual aspect reign over our lives. For such a person
is guilty of granting supremacy within himself to something that was not meant for supremacy, and that is supposed to be in a subordinate position. It turns out that although the intellectual is natural, for a man to be intellectual is unnatural; in the same way carnality is natural, but for a man to be carnal is unnatural. (p. 74)
Indeed, “according to natural purpose, man must live in the spirit, subordinate everything to the spirit, be penetrated by the spirit in all that is of the soul, and even more so in all that is physical—and beyond these, in the outward things, too, that is, family and social life. This is the norm!” (p. 75).
This, in sum, is St. Theophan's account of the human person. It is the mind of the Fathers, of the Church, even if, in some specific details the saint amplifies what the Fathers left in summary, weaving the wisdom of the Church into the scientific knowledge of his (and our) day. And this account is the basis on which I will further consider (in forthcoming posts) the work (energeia) of God in the life of the Christian, and the battle of the passions (I will also draw on St. Theophan here)—as these subjects are given in the New Testament.
Posted by Clifton at January 24, 2005 11:30 AM | TrackBackGood summary. As someone who used to be a modernist/secularist through and through (well, surely some small part of me was preserved by Grace! :), I was moved toward Christianity by a serious examination of what it means to be a man. What is man? That question separates the modernist/secularist from everyone else more than anything else, in my opinion. The existence and nature of God would seem prior, but it is really an abstraction until you feel it in your own soul - with an importance on the same level as breathing. What is moral depends upon what you are, and this of course determine what, and who, your neighbor is. If you get the first wrong you get the second wrong.
The idea, or rather fact of the 'heart' is something lost on modern materialist conceptions, and thus modern man completely misses it. He is crippled from the beginning of his otherwise very through investigations in "psychology" and the like. Ancient, pre-Christian man had a better grasp of man than the modernist, as an example take Heraclites: "A man's character is his destiny". The idea that man might be deeper than a meaningless phenomenology based upon collection of chemicals/neurons is just wishing thinking to the modernist. As our society has relied more and more on the modernist "expert" and academic, man as he truly is has pushed more and more into the cultural rug.
Orthodox Christian anthropology reminds us what, and who we really are. It reveals to us that true repentance is possible, because we are never determined - never hopelessly lost. It reveals to us just how deep, how "wonderfully" we are made!!