Transcription
Welcome. This is David, and today we're going to be taking a look at Orthodox anthropology and some of the basics that you might want to know. I'm not—I'm going to try not to go in too much depth with this kind, so I just want to stick to the basics. Because a lot of people, understandably, uh, get into the advanced parts of Orthodox Christian anthropology because it's—it's a distinguishing mark, especially the theology of theosis. Right, it's all very important, but we can't really understand any of that until we understand the basics of what a human nature is and how it's constituted. So let's just jump in straight ahead. What is human nature? Let's start with the very, very basics.
Human nature is a combination of body and soul, right? So body plus soul equals human nature. There you go. And you can—you can understand it in that way. So when we speak of human nature, we're just speaking of the combination of body and soul. Human nature exists in the form of the unity of the body and soul, because neither the body nor the soul can exist solely on their own, but the mode in which they exist is in the mode of their unity. So in our conception, we are born with a body and a soul, and in—in our understanding of Orthodox personhood, especially once Jerusalem explains that, we understand in a way—person, and I'm going to get into this more in a decent—what person it is, but personhood is hypostasis. More so, is the existence where things come to unite into existence. Um, so that is, for example, uh, the human body and the human soul come to existence in unity in the human hypostasis. Uh, at least that's how Leontius of Jerusalem explains it tonight, and I believe that's how mostly in patristics, that's how you see it. You know, we have Cappadocian Fathers that explain personhood as existence or mode of existence.
But what is even a body, and what even is a soul? Well, we know—I think very—I—I think we know a lot about what a body is, but what even is a—is a soul? It is—think of it this way: the soul is what manifests the—the emotions, the intellect, and all of these immaterial aspects of humanity that the body doesn't. Certain people influenced—and mostly this is the secular way that secular people think—most people influenced by mostly Hellenic cosmology mainly think that human bodies are merely empty vessels that are animated by the human soul, and the—the objective of the human soul is to escape the body, and the personhood is merely the human soul. Now this is not true. What is true is that the soul animates the human body; that is indeed true. But what is not true is that the human soul is not a—is not a person, and it's not something that wants to avoid or wants to leave the human body. The human body and the human soul are united; that's the way that we're created, which means that the body and the soul are complementary, and they require each other, and they are both good. So we don't take this view where the body and the soul oppose each other.
But you might say, David, doesn't Saint Paul and scripture consistently refer to the body as the earthly life and the spirit as a spiritual life, and doesn't he speak of a soulful life, and how does it even function? This is a—this is from the debate between Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Apollinarius, and Polyneices. If you didn't know, uh, believed that Christ did not have—uh, there were two stages of his thinking, by the way. Uh, first stage is that he didn't think Christ had a human soul, and then he started to say, "Oh, well, Christ doesn't have a human mind." So Apollinarius considered the human mind as the person, and this was his heresy, right? This is considered heretical in the second council. Apollinarius believed in a tripartite view where man is a body, soul, and spirit. The way he understood it is that you have a body, you have the flesh, you have uh, the soul, which is referred to as the animal soul, and you have the spirit, which is the mind. Psychographic says this is not true; that's not the Orthodox view. Man, he has a—here's the view that I expressed just now: body and soul, and the body and soul analogy especially is very important in Christology, but in a separate video we're going to be talking about that. Um, but to get back on track, um, Saint Gregory of Nyssa explains why that tripartite explanation exists in scripture. The body, in a way analogized, especially in its fallen form—so Saint Paul is speaking of in the—in the sense of the fallen world—the body symbolically represents uh, the material world, the earth, uh, which again we need to remember the earth is not evil, but it is fallen, whereas the spirit—the spiritual world—it represents the spiritual realm, right? The afterlife, the other world, the realm of God in a sense, right? And the soul is—well, he will use it as in a combination of both of these things, and so we will have to align with a spiritual lifestyle, which is what aestheticism is, right? Uh, Saint Paul is not making an anthropological comment when he's speaking of these things; he's not saying that this—that the body is evil, that we need to escape our body, but rather the body uh, represents a feature of the fallen world, which is worldliness, right? The love of the world, which is evil, and—and passions, right? But the soul likewise is afflicted by passions too, so you—if even—even a soul cannot run away from this.
Another question might—might come from you, which might be, you know, what's the distinguishing mark between um, human nature and animal natures, right? Well, animals have an animal body and an animal soul. We know what an animal body constitutes, but what is an animal soul? What do they constitute? Well, if you're speaking about animals, uh, they have their—the powers of their soul, according to I believe Saint Maximus or Saint John Damascene, one of the two. They say, um, animal souls have to have the function of imagination, and they have the function of growth, but they don't have the function of intellect. That is what we have—intellect, which is the most excellent part of human nature, according to Saint Gregory of Nyssa. Even plants—plants, trees—even they have souls, but they don't have imagination; they don't have that function, but rather their function is growth. So they, you know, they lack that imaginative aspect that animals have, and imagination and growth are irrational aspects of the soul, right? The intellect is the rational aspect of the soul, which is what really distinguishes us from animals and other beings is—is possessing this in a sense. And uh, I want to get into personhood a little bit, how it all meshes up with this. Uh, as—as we have seen, uh, the heresy of Apollinarianism is reducing personhood to either an instantiation of nature or a—a function of nature. Personhood is something that is apophatic; we know it by what it isn't. We know that personhood is not the mind; it's not the soul; it's not the will; it's not the body, okay? But rather it is something distinct—definitionally, especially very distinct from all of these things, and it's a transcendental uh, reality and translated aspect of what makes one a human being. As you've said before, you can consider a human person at the place where natures come to unite and exist, right? Um, this is—you can say it in a definitive sense a little bit—in a descriptive sense to make it easy for people. You can definitely say that descriptively only, right? You can't define personhood as this, but in a descriptive sense, personhood is uh, the nature with particular defining characteristics. So what is David? Well, he's a human being; he has particular characteristics that make him different from um, other—other human beings, right? So that will not be wrong, but you're not coming into the heart of who I really am as a person. And this can be applied to God too, right? You have—you—you have to have a personal relationship with God, who is also a person, and it is not something that you can really philosophically explain, but rather a transcendental reality that you can come to know through experience only. To a certain point, philosophy can help us understand and explain what personhood is, right? And there are certain faculties of the soul as well. Uh, I look Korean with this hairstyle—what the heck? I'm gonna fix this. Yeah, bad hair. I did wake up quite recently, but let's move on.
There are also faculties of human nature. These faculties are will, energy, and mind, right? These faculties of nature are also something that God possesses. God has a mind; He has a will; and He has energy—activity, or more so—and you can understand as mind as where the intellect is and where the intellect acts, right? So these are the operations of the soul; these are the activities of the soul. Um, so into like the act—intellectual activities—something like mathematics or chess or philosophy; these are operations of the soul; these are functions of the soul, whereas the functions of the body, one can say, is—is, for example, bodily movement, right? So in a sense, says Saint John Damascene, you can speak of human beings having two natures, right? Body nature and soul nature. They are distinct; they're united, yet they're distinct, and they are both natures. So one can ask very reasonably, why don't we speak of human nature as two natures in a way? Why don't we speak of Christ as two natures? What's going on? That's because when we're using the term nature generally, we're referring to species. Body is not a species; soul is not a species; human nature—their combination—is a species. That's why we speak of human nature as one species and one activity, but technically speaking, they are in a sense two activities. I don't want to confuse you a bit too much, but this is—understand nature as species, and everything becomes much more simpler, okay? And—and I want to finalize this with two more things: a proof for how personhood is distinct from nature and explaining the nous and the functions of it a little bit.
Um, a good proof for how the person—that is distinct from nature—is, for example, if you look at a picture of yourself from 10 years ago, there's obviously change—you change in your body, and you change in your soul, but you didn't change as a person. You change as a person—you're—you know, when you say changed as a person, what people mostly refer is that you changed in your—in the—in certain aspects of your soul, but uh, you didn't change as a person; there's—you're still the same exact person. So that alone proves that body, soul, and personhood are distinct, right? They're not the same thing. If—if personhood was merely a quality of the soul or a quality of uh, body, you will still have this kind of a—you will change as a person too. Now I don't wanna—I don't wanna—I don't wanna make—make sure that our bodies don't change, or bodies don't change from human bodies to a different body, right? Uh, there's still our bodies, but they still undergo change, right? So when—when a person changes—when you apply change to someone as a person—what we're really saying is that the change occurs in their soul and their body. Okay, that's how we understand it, because we still have a personal understanding of what a—what—what of soul, right? So for example, if I'm drinking water like this, we don't say my body drank the water; we say I drank the water, okay? Because there's this personal uh, understanding because it's—it's a personal union that the body and soul has.
Finally, the nous—a little word on the nous, and then I'll finalize this. Uh, the nous—there's a lot of really detailed writings on it that I'm not going to get into—maybe one day, but today I am not going to do that. But the nous is a faculty of the soul; it's—it's—it's an aspect of our soul. It's commonly translated to mind, because nous in the Greek does mean mind, but the way I've seen it used is that it's kind of distinct from mind—to the way it's used—it is in a way—they—a—you know how our eyes have—see what is material, what is visible—the nous allows us to see the invisible. It's not a third eye; don't—it's not a like a weird Hindu thing, but it's what allows us to perceive the invisible and the conceptual, okay? Because we understand—in Orthodox Christian faith—that conceptual things aren't merely things that are begotten by a mind; certain conceptual things do actually have real metaphysical existence, such as logic. The nous is what allows us to see logic. If you don't see logic—like, for example, imagining logic as some humanoid form—that's not what the nous does, but when we speak of logic and when we comprehend it and we understand it, that is—that is what the nous does. And what's really important about the nous is that this is how we perceive and come to know God in His energies, right? Because again, even God's energies are invisible—how can we even come to know that? Well, the nous allows us to see what is conceptual and what is conception that has being, and God's energies—even those that are invisible in a sense—in—in—in this, especially in the writings of the monks, you will come to understand—this is how they have a personal communication relationship with God. This is the basis of Saint Basil's Letter 234, and this is the basis of Saint Gregory Palamas's defense of Hesychasm, right? This is why Saint Gregory Palamas defends Hesychasm; he is defending Orthodox anthropology and—or—ability to be able to communicate and to have a relationship with God this way. It's the nous; it's—it's this function of the soul that sees the invisible. And the only way the nous can truly function is through faith, which—in that reason—which allows reason to see what is invisible. So we don't take this like anti-reason approach that certain religions take, but rather we understand that reason becomes perfect through faith, because faith is what allows us to see the invisible, okay? And the relationship between reason and—reason and faith is—is akin to the reason between the soul and the body, right? The body is the visible; the soul is the invisible; and the soul allows us to see the invisible. And again, when I say see the invisible, please don't understand it as we see things as if—as if they materialize, but as something totally and completely different. And I want to—I want to leave it up with that. This—this is the basics of Orthodox anthropology, the best way I could explain it to you. I think once you kind of grasp this—once you read Orthodox spiritual writings from the ascetics—everything will be much more easier for you to understand. Everything about Orthodox epistemology, I think, is going to be much more easier to understand, and uh, I hope you appreciate this video. You know, if this was helpful for you, share it with your friends; give it a like; comment some nice things about my hair; and I'll see you guys in the next video. Thank you for watching. God be with you all. Hey, I'm gonna say it again: See you in the next video. Goodbye.