(*) Clark Carlton was reared as a Southern Baptist in middle Tennessee. He was enrolled as a Raymond Brian Brown Memorial Scholar at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC when he converted to the Orthodox Church.

Clark earned his B.A. in philosophy from Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, TN and and M.Div. from St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in NY, where he studied under the renowned church historian, Fr John Meyendorff. He also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Early Christian Studies from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

At present, Clark is assistant professor of philosophy at Tennessee Tech University, where he teaches the history of philosophy as well as philosophy of religion and logic. He writes on a number of subjects and has had articles published in the Journal of Christian Bioethics, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, and the Journal of Early Christian Studies.

Clark is also the author of “The Faith” series from Regina Orthodox Press: The Faith: Understanding Orthodox Christianity; The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know about the Orthodox Church; The Truth: What every Roman Catholic Should Know about the Orthodox Church; and The Life: The Orthodox Doctrine of Salvation.

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Today’s topic is “The Limits of Reason.”

I’ve received many excellent suggestions over the past few months, and today I would like to address one of those. A listener wrote in wanting to know about the limits of reason in the Orthodox life. In order to try and answer this question, we need to break it down into more fundamental questions.

The first of these questions is: “What is the object of our reason?” In other words, what is it that we are trying to know? Let’s start out with four objects: a rock, a man, an idea, and, finally, God. The second question is: “What do we mean by reason?” The Fathers, for example, distinguish between the discursive reason, or the theoria, and a more intuitive inelection which they called nous.

Let’s start with the first question and then we will combine it with the second. Obviously, there are significant differences between a rock, a man, an idea, and God. A rock is a physical object. It takes up space and has certain properties that can be analyzed using scientific equipment. All of which is to say that a rock can be experienced empirically, using the physical senses, and that the experience can be quantified.

A man is also a physical object inasmuch as he is also a physical body. The ancient Greeks disagreed, however, about whether there was anything more to man than his body. The Atomists and the Epicureans insisted that the soul was made out of matter, just like the body. The Platonists, on the other hand, believed that the soul was an immaterial and immortal form imprisoned in the body. The difference of opinion has persisted down to our own day, with the majority now firmly in the materialist camp. Many forms of psychology and all of the so-called social sciences presume that human life can be studied empirically and quantified.

I don’t want to get into this today. Perhaps it will make a topic for another episode. But let me state, if only in passing, that one need not embrace a full blown Platonic or Cartesian dualism in order to reject this materialistic reduction of man. We are Christians, not Platonists, and for us the great ontic dividing line is not between spirit and matter, but between creation and Creator.

Now to continue. An idea—let’s say the idea of beauty, for example—is quite different from a rock or a man in that it is not a physical thing. It is a mental concept. Plato, of course, believed that ideas are more real than physical things. Nominalists, on the other hand, believed that ideas are merely names, and that the only things that exist are particular things. Many ancient Greeks believed that beauty could be quantified—the Golden Ratio, for example. But this is because they also believed that numbers were real and that the cosmos was a fundamentally rational place.

Some modern psychologists have also argued that beauty can be quantified, but for different reasons. They argue that certain quantifiable, physical features—facial symmetry, for example—register in the brain as being more pleasing than others. There is, however, a disjunction here between all of these theories about what makes something appear beautiful to us and the phenomenal experience of beauty. Understanding the geometry of a beautiful painting or the mathematical complexity of something like Mozart’s Recordare might enhance my intellectual appreciation for the piece. But I seriously doubt that it adds much of anything to the actual experience. To dissect art is to lose the forest for the trees.

Modern man, by and large, believes that he can study and understand man and beauty the same way he studies a rock. That is, the scientific age is predicated upon one, fundamental assumption—that absolutely everything is quantifiable and therefore subject to the discursive reason.

This, of course, brings us to the problem of knowing God. The Orthodox tradition holds and has always held that God is not like a rock. Just as importantly, however, we also believe that God is not a human being at large, a sort of super-celestial ego. Mormons, by the way, believe that God used to be a human being and has a physical body.

On the contrary, we believe that God is radically unlike anything else that exists. That is the point behind the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. This also means, however, that God is not an idea or like an idea. For Plato, the Good (that’s “good” with a capital “G”) was to the intelligible world what the sun is to our world—the source of all light and knowledge. For him, God is essentially the form of all forms.

But our God revealed himself to Moses, not as an idea, but as the great “I AM”, the God who delivered Israel from the bondage of Egypt and who was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. If this is the case, then how do we know God? Outside of Orthodoxy, there are four fundamental approaches.

The first is that of the secular materialist who rejects the existence of an independent creator and, instead, interprets religion through psychology or the social sciences. Feuerbach argued that when we talk about God we are really just talking about ourselves, and most materialists would agree with that appraisal.

The second approach is that of the pagan materialist who believes in a Higher Power, but one who is, nonetheless, very much a part of the physical cosmos. Mormonism would be an obvious example.

The third is that of the religious Platonist who believes that, while God is not knowable through the physical senses, he is knowable through the use of human reason. This view is popular among some Catholics and Reformed thinkers.

The fourth is that of the Pietist who believes that God can only be approached via some sort of personal experience which is usually emotionally charged. God is not so much known as felt. Most Charismatics would fall in this category.

The Orthodox approach to this issue is quite different, however, and this is because we not only insist on the absolute difference between creature and Creator, but also because we differentiate between different types of human intellection. The Greek word nous is usually translated as either “mind” or “intellect”. During the Patristic Period, however, the Fathers began to use the term in a specialized way, and they distinguished it from another word—theonia. They used theonia to refer specifically to what we would call the discursive reason. This is pretty much what we mean when we use the word “reason” or the verb “to think”. To put it as simply as possible, whenever we think in language, i.e., sentences, we are using the discursive reason or theonia.

Now some modern philosophers have argued that we cannot think at all except in some kind of language. In other words, all reason is discursive reason. Most of the ancients would not have agreed with that, however, and certainly the Fathers would not agree. They used the word nous to refer to the faculty of intuitive apperception.

In one sense, nous can be thought of as the faculty of attention. But when you are writing a check or reading a book, you are not simply doing the activity, you are aware of yourself doing the activity. Now sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we are doing, so focused, that we tune out everything around us. In those rare cases, our nous is focused completely on the task at hand.

At other times we find ourselves distracted. I have, for example, given an entire lecture while thinking about something else. And I’m sure you have driven somewhere only to arrive and not remember a thing about your journey. This scattering of attention is a product of the Fall. Not only is the nous scattered, however, it is also disjoined from the core of our very self which the Fathers call “the heart”.

I must stress at this point that in biblical anthropology the “heart” is not the seat of the emotions. Those are located in the “bowels”. The “heart”, rather, is the psychosomatic center of man. When moderns talk about heart and head, they usually mean the emotions and the intellect. But when the Fathers talk about the separation of the heart from the mind, they mean that the nous has somehow become stuck in the discursive reason, i.e., the brain.

This is why the Fathers talk about the nous descending into the heart. They do not mean that we need to get in touch with our emotions. They mean that our attention needs to be drawn back inward to the core of our being where Christ dwells through the Holy Spirit.

God is not a rock. We cannot put him in a test tube. Nor is God an idea like an isosceles triangle. We cannot figure him out. God is not like a human being either, and yet God created us in his own image that we might know him. More to the point, he has revealed himself to us most fully as a man, the God-man Jesus Christ.

The discursive reason is all very fine. God gave it to us after all. But it has its limits. The road to Zion is in our hearts, and if we are to find that road, we must cultivate the nous and direct it inward. That is what the ascetical life of the Church is all about. In this regard, by the way, I highly recommend the works of Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos.

And now may our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, through the intercessions of St. Innocent of Alaska and the blessed Elder Sophrony Sakharov, have mercy upon us all and grant us a rich entrance into his eternal kingdom.