02 — The Human Composite
The anthropology the ascetic vocabulary presupposes. Without it the terms are unusable: nous, heart, soul, and spirit name parts of an account of what a human being is, and the whole diagnostic language of thoughts and passions depends on a specific model of the soul’s powers and of what the fall did to them.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
Ascetic theology is applied anthropology. Every claim in this literature about what a thought is, how a passion forms, what watchfulness guards and what dispassion heals, presupposes an account of the human composite that the writers rarely stop to explain because they assumed it. This section supplies it.
Nous, Heart, and Soul treats the vocabulary of the faculties: the nous as the organ of direct spiritual perception, distinguished sharply from dianoia or discursive reason; the heart as the centre in which the nous is to dwell; and the standing question of dichotomy and trichotomy — soul and body, or spirit, soul, and body. It also states the correction the tradition made to Evagrius on this point: the image of God is not located in the nous alone, and the body is not a container the nous escapes.
The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin treats the powers of the soul: the tripartite scheme of rational, incensive, and desiring faculties, inherited from Greek philosophy and put to work by Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus; the “passible part” as the region in which the passions arise; and the reading of Genesis 3:21 that explains why that region is disordered without making it evil. The conclusion governs everything that follows: ascesis retrains the passible part, it does not amputate it.
| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| Nous, Heart, and Soul | Nous, dianoia, kardia, psyche, pneuma; the nous as spiritual perception rather than reason; the heart in the Macarian corpus and in St. Theophan; dichotomy and trichotomy; why the image is not in the mind alone |
| The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin | The tripartite soul (logistikon, thymos, epithymia); the passible part as the field of the passions; the philosophical borrowing and its Christian transformation; the garments of skin and the pleasure–pain cycle |
See Also
- The Terms and Their Greek — the table of terms defined here
- The Passions — what goes wrong in the composite described here
- Theological Anthropology — the hub article
- Theosis: The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound — the same motif in the doctrine of deification