Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jack Leahy's avatar

The way I have been seeing our current difficulties is the triumph the current misbegotten anthropology. We don't know who we are and therefore how we should live. I have scattered myself in so many directions. I am still doing that. It is easy to get lost. Hence, the meaning crisis.

I mentioned Nous in a previous comment. As it happens a book arrived for me to today entitled, you guessed it, The Nous: Themes from the Philokalia. Here's the definition of Nous given:

Nous (Gk: Νους) "The highest faculty in man, through which--provided it is purified--he knows God or the inner essences of principles...of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. 'The Nous' does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition, or 'simple cognition' (the term used by St. Isaac the Syrian). -The Philokalia Vol 1 p.362.

To take this definition of the Nous as true is to see it as a rejection of our current technocratic conception of being human and the purpose--or lack thereof--of human existence. It is to engage in, with Marcel and others, an "obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction".

Or it is, rather, to get at the root of our disease. All else is to cover up or to exacerbate our symptoms, nothing more.

Expand full comment
Nanda Kishor's avatar

Chanting the Office... Must be quite an experience!

Expand full comment
34 more comments...

No posts