The Heart as Center

St. Theophan’s anthropology divides the human person into three “layers” — body, soul (dusha), and spirit (dukh) — and locates at the heart the living center where these meet, where everything from the outside falls, where the passions lodge, and where prayer is gathered before God. From this structured psychology his whole ascetical program follows: the spirit, dulled in the worldly person, must be awakened and the soul re-attuned to it, that the person may be drawn into communion with God.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Three Layers of the Person

The foundation of St. Theophan’s anthropology is the threefold division of the human person into body, soul, and spirit. He states it with characteristic simplicity in his collection of letters of spiritual direction: “A man has three layers of life: that of the spirit, of the soul, and of the body” (The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, Letter 5, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). This is not a tripartite division of the human person into separable substances, but a description of three orders or levels at which the one life of the person is lived. The body is the physical and sensory order; the soul (Russian dusha) is the seat of ordinary mental, emotional, and practical life — reasoning, feeling, willing, and the activity by which a person manages his affairs in the world; and above both stands the spirit (dukh), the highest and God-ward order of the person.

St. Theophan inherits this scheme from the Pauline and patristic tradition, but his distinctive achievement is the precision and accessibility with which he sets it out. He writes not as a speculative theologian constructing a metaphysics of the soul, but as a physician of souls mapping the interior terrain so that an ordinary reader may recognize his own experience in it. It is this clarity that made his anthropology so usable for modern lay readers, who could find in his letters a description of the very movements of their own inner life.

The order of the three layers is also an order of dignity and direction. The lowest concern of the person is the bodily life, with its needs and pleasures; above it stands the broad and busy life of the soul, with its sciences, arts, and affairs; and above both, the spirit, which alone reaches toward God. St. Theophan’s persistent complaint about his contemporaries is that this order is so easily inverted, the lowest concerns crowding out the highest until the spirit is scarcely heard. The threefold scheme is therefore not merely a piece of psychology but a measure by which a person may judge where, in fact, the weight of his life is being spent — and whether the highest faculty is governing the rest, as it ought, or has been driven into silence.

The Spirit (Dukh): What Makes Man Capax Dei

The decisive term in this anthropology is the spirit, the highest faculty, which is precisely what makes the human person capable of God (capax Dei). St. Theophan describes it as “that force which God breathed into man when He created him,” recalling the Genesis account of the divine inbreathing (The Spiritual Life, Letter 9, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). The spirit is the God-ward orientation built into the very constitution of the person: it “knows God, seeks God, and in Him alone finds rest” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 9). Here St. Theophan gathers the whole Augustinian and patristic insight that the human heart is restless until it rests in God, and locates it precisely in the spirit.

He draws the contrast between soul and spirit in a memorable formula that fixes the hierarchy of the person: “The human soul makes us a little above the animals, while the spirit makes us a little below the angels” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 9). The soul, with its reasoning and feeling and willing, raises man above the beasts, but it is the spirit that opens him upward, toward the angelic and the divine. A person who lives only at the level of soul and body, however cultivated his mind and refined his feelings, lives below the dignity proper to him; the spirit is what makes him more than a clever animal.

The Manifestations of the Spirit

St. Theophan does not leave the spirit as an abstraction. He identifies the concrete ways in which it manifests itself in the person, and here two of his works present parallel but slightly differing triads, each worth noting in its own terms. In The Spiritual Life the manifestations of the spirit are given as the fear of God, the conscience, and the thirst or longing for God — the awe before the divine, the inner moral voice, and the restless seeking that finds no rest but in God (The Spiritual Life, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition; see What the Spiritual Life Is).

In The Path to Salvation the third member of the triad is given as prayer rather than the thirst for God, and St. Theophan correlates each manifestation with a corresponding power of the soul: “To the spirit belong: the fear of God (corresponding to the mind), conscience (corresponding to will), and prayer (corresponding to feeling). The fear of God gives birth to prayer and makes the conscience clear” (The Path to Salvation, Part One, Ch. 2, “The Chief Activities of the Body, Soul and Spirit”; see The Path to Salvation). The two triads are complementary rather than contradictory: the thirst for God of the one work issues in the prayer of the other, for the longing of the spirit becomes articulate as prayer. In both, the fear of God stands first as the root from which the rest grows, generating prayer and clearing the conscience.

The Heart as Center

If the spirit is the highest faculty, the heart is the center where the whole life of the person converges. St. Theophan teaches that the heart is the meeting-place into which everything flows from without and within: “Everything which enters the soul from the outside … falls into the heart.” For this reason, he says, “That is why it is called the center of life” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 8, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). The heart is not merely the organ of feeling but the existential center of the person, the place where impressions, thoughts, and movements settle and take root, and from which the direction of the whole life is determined.

It is precisely because the heart is this center that it becomes the chief battlefield of the ascetical life. “The passions more than anything tyrannize the heart” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 8). The passions seize upon the very center of the person and bend it to their own ends. St. Theophan describes, in more physical terms, how the passions also fasten upon the body: “Penetrating the bodily members, the passions receive in them a place to settle, or they make out of them a certain unapproachable fortress…” (The Path to Salvation, Part Three). The image is military: the passions establish themselves in the heart and the body as in a fortress from which they must be dislodged. The work of salvation is thus, at one level, the recovery of the heart from this tyranny.

The Ascetical Program That Follows

From this anthropology the whole ascetical program flows with logical necessity. In the fallen and worldly person the spirit is dulled, suppressed, or enslaved, and the soul, cut off from the spirit’s God-ward orientation, sinks into the merely bodily and worldly. The first work, therefore, is the awakening of the spirit and the re-attuning of the soul to it, so that the person is reordered from his highest faculty downward. And because the heart is the center, this reordering is accomplished chiefly through prayer understood as the gathering of the scattered powers of the person into the heart, where they stand collected before God (see The Prayer of the Heart).

The goal of this entire labor is communion with God — the deification or theosis in which the human person, awakened in spirit and gathered in heart, is united to the God for whom he was made (see Theosis). St. Theophan’s anthropology is thus never merely descriptive; it is the map of a journey, drawn so clearly that the traveler can find his own position on it and see the way forward.

See Also

References

  • The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It (also rendered The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It: An Extended Letter). Trans. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (Letter 5: the three layers of life — spirit, soul, body. Letter 8: the heart as the center of life, into which everything falls and where the passions tyrannize. Letter 9: the spirit as the force God breathed into man, which knows, seeks, and rests in God; the soul above the animals, the spirit below the angels.)
  • The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation. St. Theophan the Recluse. Trans. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (Part One, Ch. 2, “The Chief Activities of the Body, Soul and Spirit”: the spirit’s fear of God, conscience, and prayer, corresponding to mind, will, and feeling. Part Three: the passions penetrating the bodily members and settling there as in a fortress.)