Impermanency

We are born, walk around for a while, and then disappear. Civilizations rise and fall. No one can dispute that species of plants and animals come and go, that continents drift and produce mountain ranges, and that wind and water erode rock and level mountains.

Twentieth-century cosmology discovered that the universe is destined to end with the Big Freeze, a cold eventless state of electrons, neutrinos, antielectrons, and antineutrinos. Right now, the universe is expanding; galaxies not bound to each other in gravitational orbits are rushing away from one another. Stars will come and go for a while. But after a trillion years, all the interstellar gas and galactic dust will be used up, and new star formation will cease. In one hundred trillion years, energy production from stars will be over. The galaxies will contain only burned-out dwarf stars, mile-sized neutron stars, and black holes. The coalescence of these relics will cause the rebirth of some stars, but most of these relics will escape from the gravitational pull of their galaxies, ending the rebirth of stars.

 Life will have vanished without leaving any traces long before the universe reaches its final eventless, cold state.^[1] Whatever the details of how the universe ends, one thing is certain—consciousness and intelligence in this universe are impermanent. Nothing lasts.

Considering the end of the universe saddens some of us. Theorist Edward Witten, contemplating how the universe ends like a wisp of smoke with the Big Freeze, said such a fate “is not very appealing.” Astrophysicist Glenn Starkman concurs that such a universe “would be the worst possible universe, both for the quality and quantity of life,” and his colleague Lawrence Krauss adds, “All our knowledge, civilization, and culture are destined to be forgotten. There’s no long-term future.”^[2]

Dennis Overbye, a physicist and a New York Times science reporter, is overwhelmed by the Big Freeze: “It’s hard not to want to scream at our own insignificance in all of this. . . . [in this] tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[3]

Through diligent experiment and observation, scientists have established a spectacularly accurate account of the world, except for the human being. Leo Tolstoy heard from the scientists of his day that “you are an accidentally united little lump of something. That little lump ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its ‘life.’ The lump will disintegrate, and there will be an end of the fermenting and of all the questions.” Science only confirmed the absurdity of life.[4] In our day, we are told “certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect;”[5] the collection calls itself a human being and disintegrates upon death. That we are fermenting lump is no longer part of science, and rational analysis shows that we are not a collection of particles.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger argues that science is incapable of explaining how we see: “If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? He will say: In my picture not at all.”^[6]

Although Schrödinger employs technical language, his insights into the nature of perception are based on straightforward observations. Let me restate his argument. Suppose sunlight is reflected from a red apple into the eye of a landscape painter. The sunlight passes through the lens of the eye and strikes the retina, a sheet of densely packed receptors—4.5 million cones and 90 million rods. Activated by the incoming sunlight, chemical changes occur in the rods and cones, which are then translated into electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Further electrical and chemical changes take place in the brain. In terms of the physiology of seeing, this description is complete; however, the sensation red has not entered this scientific account of perception. The landscape painter experiences the red of the apple, not the myriad chemical and electrical changes necessary for seeing.^[7]

Science cannot explain how we perceive red, much less how we remember, speak, and think, and consequently is not a guide for living or understanding death. In his sustained contemplation of death, Tolstoy arrived at the conclusion that if no part of us is infinite, that is, divine, then all human endeavors are vanities, and life is absurd.[8] (See my post “Tolstoy, Nihilism, and Suicide.”) Science cannot explain the perception of red, a mundane within us, much less encounter the divine within us if it exists.

Tolstoy claimed that he saw the divine within the Russian peasants; for there was hardly one unbeliever in a thousand amongst them, and they lived their Orthodox Christian faith. Peasants spent their entire lives in heavy labor, were content with life, and “accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good.”

How the peasants lived taught him that he made another mistake. His conclusion that “Life is evil and an absurdity” referred only to his life, not to human life. His life of indulging his desires supported by the labor of peasants was “senseless and evil.”

Most moderns doubt Tolstoy’s evaluation of Russian peasant life. Everywhere we moderns look, we see the ethos of capitalism at work. To see the divine in human life, we must look beyond economics.

Mathematics, Science, and the Timeless

Virtually every mathematician and theoretical physicist believes that mathematical objects exist and that relations between them are independent of human beings. From his experience of doing mathematics, Godfrey Harold Hardy, recipient of the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his distinguished work in mathematical analysis, was convinced that “mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our ‘creations,’ are simply the notes of our observations.”^[9] Alain Connes, holder of the Chair of Analysis and Geometry at the Collège de France, agrees: “There exists, independently of the human mind, a raw and immutable mathematical reality. . . . The working mathematician can be likened to an explorer who sets out to discover the world.”^[10] Roger Penrose, emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, maintains that the Mandelbrot set used extensively in chaos theory and fractal analysis is not an invention of Benoit Mandelbrot and did not come into existence when the Polish-American mathematician wrote down its definition: “Like Everest, the Mandelbrot set is just there.”^[11]

 Many years after the tenth grade, as a theoretical physicist, I discovered timelessness in a different way. How strange that Homo sapiens, a flash in the pan in the history of the universe, can intellectually grasp the beginning and the end of everything, the Big Bang and the Big Freeze. Unlike zebras, kangaroos, and chimpanzees, human beings, in some mysterious way, transcend space and time.

All biological life is locked into time, into the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, senescence, and death. Perceptual life is of the here and now; memories are of past particulars, and imagination in the restricted meaning of the word is the faculty for rearranging perceptual images and in the extended use is the ability to form interior images, to envision eventful scenes and peopled places.

Clearly some special element or aspect of the mind allows Homo sapiens to transcend space and time. Without this special element, science would be impossible, for the goal of science is to find unchanging causes of phenomena, that is, first principles, or laws, that apply universally, not merely to one or two instances in space and time. The principle of inertia states that matter resists a change in motion, not that one James Brown found it difficult to move his suitcase from his front porch to his car in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 17, 1958.

The Divine Element Within

If we lack a word for an experience, we obviously cannot talk to others about it, and the experience, no matter how intense or unsettling, will fade from lack of understanding; later, we will be unable to judge whether it was significant or not.

Every scientist and mathematician, professional and student, whom I have known, can give countless occurrences in their own lives of hard, fruitless labor preceding effortless knowing. In the classroom or around the seminar table, I have heard an excited “I see it” innumerable times, but never in my life as a theoretical physicist did I reflect with colleagues about the meaning of such an experience. As a result, I remained in the dark for years about the deepest aspects of what we are. My enlightenment came only after reading Plato and Aristotle. Through straightforward reflection about the interior life, accompanied by clear thinking, Plato and Aristotle discovered two aspects of the mind, which they called nous and dianoia.  

Note: The Latin words ratio and intellectus correspond to the older Greek terms dianoia and nous. The Greek is used here because the Latin calls to mind the English words “reason” and “intellect,” which often are used as synonyms. The English words are substantially more limited and less precise than either Latin or Greek.

The Two Modes of the Mind

Labor

We commonly speak of knowing as defining, comparing, analyzing wholes into component parts, and drawing conclusions from first principles. Such discursive or step-by-step thinking the ancient Greek philosophers called dianoia. Sherlock Holmes is the epitome of dianoia at work. From the analysis of a cigar ash ground into a carpet, a scuff mark on a door, and the residue in a wineglass, he concludes the criminal is a lame aristocrat who resides in Kensington.

In discursive thinking, we either apply first principles or draw out their consequences. Dianoia operates step-by-step, almost in a mechanical fashion, repeating the same procedure again and again: A = B, B = C, therefore A = C; premise 1, premise 2, therefore, conclusion 1; etc.

What we frequently call thinking is not dianoia but the association of ideas. Consider the following scenario. In a seminar, the opening question is “What does Tocqueville mean by the equality of conditions?” Three minutes later, the participants are discussing the siege of Richmond. Through associations, the discussion moved rapidly from the equality of conditions to political equality to slavery in the South to Ken Burn’s Civil War to the Siege of Richmond. And soon, if the seminar leader did not intervene, the discussion would have moved on to the film Gone with the Wind and Clark Gable’s last line: “Frankly, lady. I don’t give a damn.” Of course, no logical, physical, or psychological connection exists between the equality of conditions and Gable’s exit line. If we step back and examine our “thinking,” we would find, perhaps to our amusement, that much of what we take for thinking is the mere association of ideas that has nothing to do with the actual structure of the world or the interior life.

Gift

Nous is the capacity for effortless knowing—to behold the truth the way the eye sees a landscape. The most famous story of sudden insight—of the “light bulb going off”—is about Archimedes. The ruler Hiero II asked Archimedes to determine if the royal crown was accurately pure gold or alloyed with silver. Archimedes knew that if the crown were not irregularly shaped, he could easily measure its volume and then check if its density was that of gold. But Archimedes could not figure out how to determine the volume of the crown. He was stumped; until one day, when he stepped into his bath, the solution suddenly appeared to him: A given weight of gold displaces less water than an equal weight of silver. He shouted, “Eureka! Eureka!” and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse.

Henri Poincaré, in his book Science and Method, describes how he discovered the relationship of Fuchsian functions to other branches of mathematics. After working out the basic properties of Fuchsian functions, he left Caen, France, where he was living at the time, to participate in a geological conference at Coutances. The incidents of the journey made him forget his mathematical work. As a scheduled break from the conference, attendees went on a bus excursion. Poincaré reports, “Just as I put my foot on the step [of the bus], the idea came to me, though nothing in my former thoughts seemed to have prepared me for it, that the transformations I had used to define Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”^[12]

When Poincaré returned home from the conference, he turned his attention to the study of certain “arithmetical questions without any great apparent result, and without suspecting that they could have the least connection with my previous researches. Disgusted at my want of success, I went away to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of entirely different things. One day, as I was walking on the cliff, the idea came to me, again with the same characteristics of conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that arithmetical transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic forms are identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”^[13]

Mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss tried unsuccessfully for two years to prove an arithmetical theorem. In a letter to a colleague, he revealed, “Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.”^[14]

Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle relates how the solution to what seemed an intractable mathematical problem in quantum physics came to him while driving a car on the road over Bowes Moor, much as “the revelation occurred to Paul on the Road to Damascus: My awareness of the mathematics clarified, not a little, not even a lot, but as if a huge brilliant light had suddenly been switched on.”^[15]

What Hoyle describes as a “huge brilliant light” and Poincaré calls a “sudden illumination”^[16] and Gauss terms “a flash of lightning,” the ancient Greek philosophers named nous, whose characteristics are “conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty,” as Poincaré noted. We cannot command nous; the direct grasp of a truth is a gift, not something we can turn on or off at will, for if we could, we would.

To know in the most profound sense is not to possess accurate information, say the names of the anatomical parts of a rabbit, or to have a method that turns out correct answers, say a mass spectroscope that determines molecular masses. To know profoundly is to experience an insight, a revelation of a deep and significant truth. Such knowing cannot be summoned by the will, although insight is usually preceded by hard work and the clearing away of major errors and wishful expectations. Sometimes, insight occurs only after giving up. In contrast to the truths arrived at through hard labor, intuitive insights are gifts. Consequently, dianoia usually results in pride, nous almost always in gratitude.

Dianoia and nous are not confined to doing mathematics and science but are fully present in any intellectual activity. Mozart, in a letter, describes how he composes music. He informs his correspondent that musical composition involves two elements: The musical parts are put together according to the rules of composition (dianoia); and the joy the composer receives when he sees the composition as a whole, much as the eye sees a beautiful landscape (nous).

Mozart: “When I feel well and in good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in a night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Where do they come from? I do not know, and I have nothing to do with it. Those which please me I keep in my head and hum them; at least others have told me that I do so. Once I have my theme, another melody comes linking itself with the first one in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole; the counterpoint, the parts for each instrument and all the melodic fragments at last produce the complete work. Then my soul is on fire with inspiration. The work grows; I keep expanding it, conceiving more and more clearly until I have the entire composition finished in my head although it may be long. Then my mind seizes it, as a glance of my eye would a beautiful picture or a handsome youth. It does not come to me successively, with various parts worked out in detail, as they will later on, but it is in its entirety that my imagination lets me hear it.”^[17]

Those poets in Modernity who explore the depths of the interior life acknowledge publicly that all artistic creation rests upon gifts. In the autobiographical essay “Catholic Education,” the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz confessed, “I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be won by my own efforts but given as a gift.”^[18]

Theodore Roethke, in “On ‘Identity’,” a lecture delivered at Northwestern University, told how at the age of forty-four, he was in a particular hell for a poet, a longish dry period; he thought he was finished as a poet. For weeks at the University of Washington, he had been teaching five-beat line to aspiring poets but felt a total fraud because he could write nothing himself. “Suddenly, in the early evening, the poem ‘The Dance’^[19] started, and finished itself in a very short time—say thirty minutes, maybe in the greater part of an hour, it was all done. I felt, I knew, I had hit it. I walked around, and I wept; and I knelt down—I always do after I’ve written what I know is a good piece.” The gift arrived, and Roethke thanked the source, and “wept for joy.”^[20]

We must not be misled into thinking that nous only operates in geniuses, giving them a direct grasp of profound truths. When a student of Euclid’s Elements truly comprehends a demonstration, he or she shouts with joy, “I see it.” Through nous, the student, in a flash, immediately grasped the whole of the argument. Without nous, any rational argument cannot be apprehended. In other tutorials, scientific, poetic, and philosophic insights occur. A student may suddenly grasp how the Iliad forms an integral whole, or why Socrates in the Phaedo, on the day of his execution, spins philosophical “tales” about the immorality of the soul to comfort his distraught friends.

The above discussion of dianoia and nous rests on straightforward observations of the interior life and consequently should not be controversial. As predictable, the ancient and modern ways of understanding the two modes of the mind are opposed. For Plato and Aristotle, dianoia is human and nous divine.

Plato rightly contends that to directly grasp a truth is superior to arguing to it. Consequently, dianoia is always in the service of nous. In the Seventh Letter, he explains how “after practicing detailed comparisons of names and definitions and visual and other sense perceptions, after scrutinizing them in benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy, at last in a flash of understanding . . . the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light.”^[21]

In Modernity, nous is denied, ignored, or misunderstood. As a result, the origin of all knowledge is taken as unaided human effort and activity; almost without exception, scientists and mathematicians claim to be the sole source of their discoveries. When intellectual insight is acknowledged as unwilled, it is attributed to the hidden workings of an unconscious mind, not to a supernatural gift. Nothing in science or mathematics is seen as a gratuitous gift from God. Scientists and mathematicians, with their denial of nous, proclaim they are beholden to nothing beyond themselves. Instead of being thankful, they are prideful, for they believe that all knowledge and invention results from human labor alone. How different was Pythagoras! After the remarkable theorem that now bears his name was revealed to him, Pythagoras in gratitude sacrificed an ox to the gods.

In mid-life, I had left materialism behind as a pernicious myth of the Dark Ages of Science. To call nous a product of unconscious thought as Poincaré and other scientists had was to beat the same old drum—the brain alone explains all interior life, although now we know with certainty that neuronal activity alone cannot account for even perception. It made more sense to me to understand nous as the divine element within each person than to attribute our highest intellectual life to the murky unconscious mind hidden somewhere in the brain. To me—and I was in the excellent company of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas—dianoia was strictly human, and nous was the divine element within us.

Spiritual Awakening

The early Christian Fathers realized that a person participates in divine life through nous, the faculty of supernatural vision. Contemplation (theoria, in Greek) is the perception or vision by nous through which a person attains spiritual knowledge. Depending on the depth of a person’s spiritual growth and development, contemplation has two main stages: it may be either the direct grasping of the first principles and the inner essences of natural things or, at its higher stage, an experience of God that is simultaneously aware that in His essence God transcends contemplation. St. Theognostos defines spiritual knowledge as the “unerring apperception of God and of divine realities.”^[22]

St. Maximos the Confessor points out that contemplation is impossible without Divine Light: “Just as it is impossible for the eye to perceive sensible objects without the light of the sun, so the human intellect [nous] cannot engage in spiritual contemplation without the light of the Spirit. For physical light naturally illuminates the senses so that they may perceive physical bodies; while spiritual light illumines the intellect [nous] so that can engage in contemplation and thus grasp what lies beyond the senses.”^[23]

Even though the practice of moral virtues is an indispensable prerequisite for contemplation, experiencing contemplation itself is a gift from “above” that cannot be produced by any amount of human effort. “A soul can never attain the knowledge of God unless God Himself in His condescension takes hold of it and raises it up to Himself,” St. Maximos explains. “For the human intellect lacks the power to ascend and to participate in divine illumination, unless God Himself draws it up—in so far as this is possible for the human intellect—illumines it with rays of Divine Light.”^[24] St. Hesychios the Priest adds that Divine Light “reveals itself to the pure intellect [nous] in the measure to which the intellect is purged of all concepts.”^[25] To be without concepts, the mind must be stilled so it rests from all thoughts.

Nous dwells at the innermost depths of a person’s being, at the spiritual center of every person’s life. This center is often called the “heart,” the place where the true self is discovered when the mysterious union between the divine and the human is consummated. Nous is sometimes called “the eye of the heart” to emphasize that it is the faculty of supernatural vision.

In the traditional Christian view, the purpose of a person’s life is deification. “God made us so that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1:4) and sharers in His eternity,” St. Maximos writes, “and so that we might come to be like Him (cf. 1 John 3:2) through deification by grace.”^[26] To become deified, the powers of ignorance and darkness must be overcome, so a person can be fully aware of the spiritual principle (nous) within him or her, a principle obscured by the Fall. The human being is the greatest mystery in the cosmos because nous is the image of God, and to know nous is in some way to know God. The Patristic Father Nikitas Stithatos elaborates: “Since our intellect [nous] is an image of God, it is true to itself when it remains among things that are properly it’s own and does not divagate from its own dignity and nature. Hence it loves to dwell among things proximate to God, and seeks to unite itself with Him, from whom it had its origin, by whom it is activated, and toward whom it ascends.”^[27] Nous allows a human person, through contemplation, to participate in Divine Life. “When the intellect [nous] has been perfected,” St. John of Damaskos teaches, “it unites wholly with God and is illumined by Divine Light, and the most hidden mysteries are revealed to it.”^[28] Whether a person contemplates created things or God Himself, he becomes what he contemplates and in this way, becomes deified.

The main image is a detail of The School of Athens (1509–1511) by Raphael at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To be continued.

Endnotes

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[1] For a detailed description of the Big Freeze, see Steven Weinberg, “The Future of Science and the Universe,” New York Review of Books (November 15, 2001).

[2] Edward Witten, Glenn Starkman, and Lawrence Krauss quoted by Dennis Overbye, “The End of Everything,” The New York Times, Science Section, January 1, 2002. Available http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/01/science/the-end-of-everything.html?scp=5&sq=%E2%80%9CThe%20End%20of%20Everything,%E2%80%9D&st=cse.

[3] Dennis Overbye, “Who Will Have the Last Word on the Universe?” The New York Times, May 2, 2023, Updated May 8, 2023. Available https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/science/end-of-universe.html.

[4] All Tolstoy quotations are from Leo Tolstoy, A Confession (1882), trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude. Available  http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/a-confession/

[5] Brian Greene, Until the End of Time (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2020), p. 405.   

[6] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153.

[7] What is true for seeing is true of the other senses: Physical and chemical changes in the brain are insufficient to explain any sensory perception. The sensible qualities a person perceives never appear in the brain as such.The brain itself is shrouded in complete silence, even while a person hears the deafening roar of a jet aircraft engine.Our brains do not become colder when we touch snow or harder when we touch iron.Not a single sugar molecule passes from the chocolate candy in the mouth to the gustatory region of the cerebral cortex—and yet we perceive sweetness notwithstanding.The brain tissue itself takes on none of the sourness of a tasted lemon or the acrid odor of the skunk’s spray that we smell.

Here is a short amusing example of why our interior life does not result from brain function alone. During the day, adenosine builds up in the brain to register the amount of time that has elapsed since a person awoke. When adenosine concentration peaks, a person feels the irresistible urge to sleep. The concentration of adenosine and the feeling of sleepiness are incommensurable. No matter how much a neuroscientist probes the brain with scans and chemical assays, she will never find sleepiness.

[8] Tolstoy, A Confession.

[9] G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1941), pp. 123-124.

[10] J.-P. Changeux and A. Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter and Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 26, 12.

[11] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, with Foreword by Martin Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 95. Italics in the original.

[12] Poincaré, Science and Method, Francis Maitland (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), p. 53.

[13] Ibid., pp. 53-54. Italics added.

[14] Karl Friedrich Gauss, quoted by Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 15.

[15] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 20 (1982): 24, 25. Available https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.aa.20.090182.000245.

[16] Poincaré, Science and Method, p. 55.

[17] Mozart, quoted by Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, p. 16.

[18] Czeslaw Milosz, “Catholic Education,” in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 87.

[19] For ‘The Dance’ read by Tom Bedlam, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKaoXy2KaJU.

[20] Theodore Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 223-24.

[21]Plato, Seventh Letter in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 344b.

[22] Theognostos, On the Practice of the Virtues, Contemplation, and the Priesthood in The Philokalia,vol. II, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 365.

[23] Maximos the Confessor, Fourth Century of Various Texts, The Philokalia, vol. II, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 239.

[24] Maximos the Confessor, First Century on Theology in The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 120.

[25] Hesychios the Priest, On Watchfulness and Holiness in The Philokalia, vol. I, p. 177.

[26] Maximos the Confessor, First Century of Various Texts, in The Philokalia, vol. II, p. 173.

[27] Nikitas Stithatos, On Spiritual Knowledge, Love, and the Perfection of Living: One Hundred Texts, in The Philokalia, vol. IV, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 143.

[28] John of Damaskos, A Discourse on Abba Philimon in The Philokalia, vol. II, p.355.