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NICHOLAS LAOS ON ORTHODOXY
Now let us turn to the article by Nicholas Laos on Dugin's website.
Straightaway, though, we are faced with a problem of translation. The passage I have quoted from Saint Maximos talks of 'the intellect'. In the notes to the English translation of The Philokalia it is explained that 'the intellect', the Greek 'nous', is:
'the highest faculty in man, through which - provided it is purified - he knows God or the inner essences or principles ('logoi') of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. Unlike the 'dianoia' or reason, from which it must be carefully distinguished, the intellect 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 intellect dwells in the 'depths of the soul'; it constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart (St Diadochos). The intellect is the organ of contemplation, the 'eye of the heart' (St Macarios).' (20)
(20) Philokalia vol 2, p.384.
Nicholas Laos by contrast uses the word 'intellect' to refer to the reasoning faculty and translates 'nous' - rather strangely I think - by 'mind'.
The distinction between 'nous' and 'psyche' (the mind or even the soul as a western reader would normally understand it, which includes the reasoning faculty) is crucial to Orthodox thinking especially in the hesychast mode. God can only be known by direct experience through the operation of what I would prefer to call 'the noetic faculty'. The story in Genesis of the eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and the expulsion from Paradise is understood as referring to the loss, or 'darkening' of this noetic faculty, the faculty that enables direct apprehension of the presence of God. The Church is seen as a hospital, the commandments of Jesus (given most obviously in the Sermon on the Mount and the words reported by St John immediately prior to the Crucifixion) are seen as the means of curing or unifying an intellect that has lost the ability to 'see God'. (21)
(21) See e.g. Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos: The Mind of the Orthodox Church, Levadia, Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 2005 (first published 1998), pp. 142-147: 'We usually think of the fall in juridicial terms, in meanings which have been taken from the law courts ... But this view of sin is not Orthodox. In Orthodoxy we regard sin as an illness of man.'
So I, in my reading of The Philokalia, have seen the nous - the 'noetic faculty' - as a distinct function of the overall mind, distinct from other functions - the reasoning faculty, the emotional faculty, the perceiving faculties. The phrase I have just quoted from Heidegger - 'man's inmost mind, the heart, the heart's core, that innermost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outermost limits and most decisively that, rightly considered, the idea of an inner and outer world does not arise' - describes it wonderfully.
Laos begins with a discussion of pre-Christian Greek philosophy, in particular the means by which Plato and Aristotle arrive at truth, arguing that neither Plato nor Aristotle believed truth could be arrived at by a process of deductive reasoning. This is the context in which, if I've understood him aright, he translates 'nous' as 'mind'. He uses the word 'intellect' to refer to the reasoning faculty which is present not as something distinct from the nous/mind but as part of it. And here is one of the first points he has to make about the 'civilisation clash' between the Greek tradition and the way in which the Greek tradition was understood in Western Europe, here specifically in mediaeval scholasticism:
'When Plato elaborated the term idea (which is one of the most controversial philosophical terms), he emphasised that seeing, or vision, is the most representative sense of man’s mental life. But the medieval Western philosophers were ignorant of that aspect of Plato’s philosophy, and, therefore, the medieval West was ignorant of the fact that, in the context of Plato’s philosophy, knowledge ‒that is, the mind’s relation to truth‒ is primarily a spiritual experience, and, hence, it primarily consists in a psychological state and only secondarily in the discovery of causal relations. [....]
'From the perspective of European rationalism, to know means to be able to give an account, and, hence, knowledge reduces to the formulation of causal relations. Furthermore, European rationalism attempts even to know God through causal relations, specifically through the subject’s syllogistic ascent to the most general concept, which the Western philosophical realists (such as Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, and Thomas Aquinas) equate with the divinity. On the other hand, Plato’s theory of ideas implies a different approach to the problem of knowledge, one that is founded on a peculiar mental sensation, or spiritual experience. Thus, from Plato’s viewpoint, an individual participates in the idea of humanity due to psychological relations among human individuals, i.e. because he experiences humanity, and not because he can logically conceive the notion of humanity.'
Thus Laos begins by denying that Plato held what everyone - at least everyone in the West - thinks is his most characteristic doctrine - the superiority of abstract ideas over directly perceived reality. Much of Heidegger seems to be a critique of Plato on this very point, though in The Essence of truth, he does stress that the 'ideas' of Plato's famous allegory of the cave (Republic Book VII) have more to do with direct perception, 'seeing', than discursive reasoning. But Laos does support a key concept in Heidegger's understanding of the Greeks, the concept of 'aletheia' - 'truth', but truth understood not as giving an account of something but as 'unforgetfulness, unconcealment and disclosure.' Which is to say direct perception.
Heidegger in general is dismissive of Christianity as, to use Nietzsche's term, 'Platonism for the masses' - Platonism being understood in its Western form, the celebration of abstract, intellectually conceived ideas above direct experience. Laos too sees the early Greek Fathers as continuous from Greek philosophy but in his view they nonetheless represented an advance. They solved a problem which had been troubling the Platonists. This was the need to reconcile the divine 'logos' (the harmony of the cosmos and the need of man to adapt to it) with the individual 'logos' (the feeling that the individual has a - this is my word. It isn't used by Laos - destiny that transcends the common cosmic harmony):
'Thus, according to ancient Greek philosophers, the harmony of the cosmos is a manifestation and a visible image of the divine logos, and man can actualise his divine potential only by participating in the cosmos (i.e. by being sociable). The Greek philosophy of participation underpins a process of socialisation, in the sense that it teaches man to be in harmony with the cosmic rhythm, and, simultaneously, it underpins a process of individuation, in the sense that it urges man to seek and actualise his own divine potential. When the ancient Greek person became aware of the previous process of individuation, he was faced with an existential stalemate, because he realised that he did not know exactly how to preserve the divine justice of the cosmos (which underpins reality) and simultaneously to experience the divine element that lies within him and is manifested in the freedom of will.' (22)
(22) The problematic here resembles Hegel's understanding of Socrates in his History of Philosophy - at least as discussed by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony. Socrates through his negative, ironic approach to the social conventions of the day opened up the possibility of an individual subjective existence, an inner life.
Laos argues that Christianity offered a satisfactory answer to the problem through the essentially new concept of the 'hypostasis', the word that in reference to the Trinity was rendered in the West as 'Person': (23)
(23) Somewhat embarrassingly a literal translation of 'hypostasis' would be 'substance', the word the Latin Fathers used where the Greeks used 'ousia', otherwise translated 'essence'. So the Western formula for the Trinity becomes three Persons with one Substance, while the Eastern formula is three Hypostases (= Substances) with one Essence. The Western 'Persona' means a mask. The equivalent Greek term - 'prosopon' - was originally used by the Sabellians who argued what was judged to be the heretical view that the three Persons of the Trinity were merely three modes in which the One God manifested Himself. According to Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon: Being as communion, pp.36-7 the Latin formula - one substance, three Persons - appears in Tertullian, therefore in the 2nd-3rd centuries, but was rejected in the East precisely because of its Sabellian implications. The Eastern formula, I think, only appears in the fourth century.
'Saint Gregory of Nyssa has emphasized the difference between the terms ousia (essence) and hypostasis. The distinction between essence and hypostasis corresponds to the distinction between what is common (Greek: koinon) and what is particular and proper (Greek: idion).'
Trinitarian doctrine taught that God was to be known not as an essence common to the whole Cosmos, as pantheism would argue, but as three hypostases:
'Given that Orthodox Christianity emphasises God’s hypostatic mode of being, the God of Orthodox Christianity is substantially different from the God of pantheism, since the God of pantheism is part of the natural cosmos and needs to be hypostasised through the souls of natural beings. Additionally, the God of Orthodox Christianity is substantially different from the God of general, abstract monotheism, since general, abstract monotheism emphasises the unity of God’s nature, whereas the God of Orthodox Christianity emphasises God’s hypostatic mode of being.
'The hypostatic mode of God’s being implies that God is not constrained by His nature and that the mode of God’s being is freedom ... God is free from every logical determination, and the cosmos is a result of God’s will (Greek: thelema), and not an emanation from God’s nature, since the nature of the cosmos is created, whereas God’s nature is uncreated.'
He then goes on to cite Maximos the Confessor - a more philosophical Maximos than the one I have evoked in the quotations from The Philokalia:
'Saint Maximos the Confessor, in his Ambiguum 7, wrote that the logos of a created being does not subsist in itself, but it only exists potentially in the creative divine Logos as a yet unmanifested possibility. Additionally, in his Ambiguum 7, Saint Maximos the Confessor, following Saint Dionysios the Areopagite, named the logoi (plural of logos) of the beings and things in the world divine “wills” (Greek: thelemata; plural of thelema). Given that the logoi of the beings and things in the world (e.g. the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) are divine wills, and not substances, God relates to the beings and things in the world by identifying and treating them as actualisations of His will. Therefore, God’s way of knowing the beings and things in the world consists in love, and it is not determined by any logical/natural necessity (since God’s mode of being is freedom). For this reason, in contrast to Western theologians (especially those who endorse essentialism (24)), the genuine Orthodox Christian theologians never feel threatened by or at odds with any scientific theory, since, from the perspective of the genuine Orthodox Christian theology, science is concerned with the investigation of the logoi of the beings and things in the world, and the logoi of the beings and things in the world are not essential attributes of God, but they are God’s wills; therefore, science can prove/disprove nothing essential about God.'
(24) 'Plato was one of the first essentialists, believing in the concept of ideal forms, an abstract entity of which individual objects are mere facsimiles. To give an example; the ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle, something that is physically impossible to make manifest, yet the circles that we draw and observe clearly have some idea in common — this idea is the ideal form.' - Wikipedia on 'Essentialism'.
We might be reminded again of Heidegger, discussing Heraclitus: 'The godhead builds the world playfully, countless times, and always as something different.' (25)
(25) Essence of Truth, p.11.