By Scott Cairns
The Mind in the Heart
The more we read in the fathers and mothers across the early centuries of the Church, the more profoundly we come to recognize this formula, this admonition that we might find our prayer lives made fruitful by our descending with our “minds” into our “hearts.” This figure, then — of the lucid nous descended into the ready kardiá, of the mind pressed into the heart — articulates both the mode and locus of our potential re-collection, our much desired healing. At the very least, it identifies the scene where this reconstitution of our wholeness might begin: the center of the human body, which is nonetheless the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Split as we are, we think with our minds and we feel with our bodies.
Imagine, however, a habit of prayer that serves to marry both faculties together.
Imagine a covert organ at the core of our beings that, duly apprehended, duly cleansed and duly inspirited, is able to re-connect those severed capacities within ourselves, so that our internal struggle between the appetites of the body and the varied solipsisms of the mind resolves, finds peace in likely collaboration.
A finer sense of things is occasioned by Bishop Kallistos Ware’s depiction of the nous as “the intellective aptitude of the heart.” In this fortunate collision of mind-talk and body-talk, we glimpse something of what the figure of the nous descended into the kardiá performs; thenous inhabited kardiá becomes the place where mind and body meet, a place where their longstanding severance might be healed, their half-measures made meet and fit, a place where the human split is potentially repaired.
The faculty occasioned by the mind’s descent into the heart is also the organ by which we apprehend God’s presence as more than an idea, and as more than a passing sensation. The severed mind can help us to the idea of God, and the severed body can provide us with a sensation of His touch; but the noetic center of a healed, triune person offers something more lasting and more satisfying than either: felt knowledge of His love and ceaseless communication with His constant presence. Recovering a sense of nous and a more profound sense of kardiá will better equip us for the journey ahead.
As for népsis and théosis, the recovery of these similarly illuminating terms may provide some very helpful insights into what it is we are to accomplish in this the often puzzling meantime of our lives. Népsis can be considered as watchfulness, sobriety, interior attention and it is this discipline of népsis that is understood by the fathers and mothers to be essential to our théosis — to our becoming like Him, our becoming holy.
As I recognize in my own, none-too-exemplary experience, sin happens when I pretty much agree to it, when I acquiesce to it. Sin, which clouds the nous and hardens the heart, is committed by our — that is, by my — failing to be watchful, sober or sufficiently attentive to the effects of what I think or say or do. The fathers almost uniformly distinguish between an unavoidable, momentary, if not-so-expedient thought (logismós) and sin itself (amartía).
The provocation to sin develops into sin only when we fail in our watchfulness.
An inexpedient thought becomes sin when we turn toward it and certainly becomes sin when we settle in to savor it.
“My son, give heed to my word,” the writer of the Hebrew Proverbs exhorts, “and incline your ear to my words,”
…That your fountains may not fail you;
Guard them in your heart;
For they are life to those who find them
And healing for all their flesh.
Keep your heart with all watchfulness,
For from these words are the issues of life.
That your fountains may not fail you, guard them in your heart.
Developing this discipline of népsis, of watchfulness, teaches us increasingly to guard our hearts from every careless slip into temptation, keeps us from missing the mark and spares us from squandering whatever spiritual development we may have accomplished. With népsis we avoid our chronic sins that would have us repeatedly starting again from zero.
The mind descended into the heart, then, describes where and how we meet Him. Watchfulness indicates how we keep that meeting place uncorrupted. And théosis is the goal of our journey to Christ-like-ness, a condition that will gain for us the kingdom of heaven, here on earth. Over time, resulting from what Brother Lawrence (a 17th-Century lay brother) has characterized as “the practice of the presence of God,” these meetings become a way of life, and they become the source of our freedom from happenstance, our freedom to face any occasion, any insult or any affliction with the consoling apprehension of God’s being with us.
Moreover, the mind-in-the-heart — the establishment of the noetic heart — also creates the organ by which we finally are able to meet our brothers and sisters, the organ by which strangers are recognized as holy messengers, and the means by which we hope finally to realize that whatsoever we do (or fail to do) to the least of these, we necessarily do (or fail to do) to Christ Himself.
As Christ prayed for us, in what our common tradition recognizes as “the high priestly prayer,” the prayer He prayed in the garden of Gesthemane “on the night when He was betrayed, or rather when He gave Himself up for the life of the world”:
“…that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”
Which means, of course, that we are loved utterly, but just as the cup was not taken from Him, neither are we likely to skirt suffering. As Saint Paul avers, God “did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all.”
Oddly enough, our own descents into suffering may turn out to be the occasions in which we — imitating His unique and appalling descent — come to know Him all the more intimately.
~Scott Cairns, “Lost Christian Language for Repairing the Person,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-cairns/repairing-the-person_b_782750.html. Scott Cairns is Professor of English at University of Missouri and Founding Director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece. Submitted by John Bonadeo.
