Why One is not Another. Brain-Mind problem in the Byzantine culture

« Ontology of Consciousness » - Helmut Wautischer – MIT PressSection I : Expanding the Ontological Matrix – Ch. 5 Courbanhttp://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ontology-consciousness

WHY ONE IS NOT ANOTHER?THE BRAIN-MIND PROBLEM IN THE BYZANTINE CULTURE.

Antoine Courban, MD

ABSTRACT

Stimulated by my studies on the human body as an anatomist, andbecause of my deep concern about critical anthropological matterslike “consciousness” and the relations inside the binomial entity“soma-psyche” (brain-mind, body-soul, flesh-spirit), I havechosen my subject for this chapter as it is widely discussed inthe history of ideas, an academic field sometimes calledculturology. I have always been puzzled by the divorce betweenmedicine and philosophy that, according to Celsius, occurred atthe time of Hippocrates of Cos. Anthropological dualism is indeedthe very heart and the major issue of such reflection. Philosophyand medicine separated, although incompletely, about the problemknown as “the disease of the soul” (Gk: psyjée, yucæ, cool breathof life; ménos, pneuma, also with the meaning “passion”). Formultiple historical reasons, passions were excluded fromconsideration in ancient scientific medicine and captured byphilosophy. Later on, due to the influence of Stoic thought onthe new Christian religion, it passed into the patrimony ofreligious sensitivity, where it can still be traced in thetraditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, more precisely those concerningmonastic life and writings. My aim, in this chapter, is tonarrate this story and to highlight some key changes in theanthropological dualistic paradigm of late antiquity, that haveallowed the emergence of a less radical and more monistic one inthe Byzantine culture. My approach is transdisciplinary. I shallmainly, although not exclusively, focus on the intermediary era

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going from the death of Galen (ca. 131 – ca. 201) until the timeof Maximus of Chrysopolis (ca. 580 – 662, also known as Maximusof Constantinople or Maximus the Confessor).

This era is erroneously thought to be the realm of theology andreligious history, when in fact it has also been an essentialbreaking point in the history of ideas, especially with regardsto the self-image of human beings. Many scholars consider Maximusas the most important and most specific “Byzantine” thinker: theone who shaped a Byzantine Weltanschauung that still impregnatesideas and the imagination of a large number of people belongingto, or influenced by, the cultural “Dower of Byzantium.” I shallfirst attempt to give a definition of what could be called so,and later explore “what, if anything, is Byzantine” as genuinelyasks Clifton Fox (1996). By discussing the historical evolutionof anthropological ideas between late Antiquity and the earlyByzantine era, I shall highlight the emergence of somesignificant non-dualistic concepts, from whose study one mayrecognize a non-monistic quality of the supposed “monism” as itis embraced by current mainstream cognitive science andneuroscience.

The Byzantine concepts involved may appear fairly familiar in themodern Anglo-American debate of brain-mind issues. Thiscontemporary debate highlights some rather Platonic notions ofmind-brain relationships that are conceived as being the actualoperation of efficient causality. In other words, as if actionsonly would come from the brain. Instead, I shall try to present amodern account of that Byzantine specific Weltanschauung, one thatlooks like Alice’s “other side of the mirror.” In this case, muchremains unfamiliar and puzzling to those who are on “this” side.I wish to let the reader better understand the culturalbackground for the triumph of contemporary academic dualism,widely believed to be a monism. This triumph is a result from thesplit between medicine and philosophy which led to the evacuation

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of passions from medical sciences and their capture byphilosophy, principally the Stoa; and resulted from the partitionbetween diseases of the body and diseases of the soul, that ledto a certain globalization of the monism-playing dualism. To thispurpose, my discussion will incidentally elaborate, en passant, onthe developments of some issues at stake throughout the historyof the Eastern Roman Empire (313 – 1453) that we call, rathererroneously, the Byzantine Empire.

THE EASTERN ROMAN OR BYZANTINE EMPIRE

By modern convention, we call Byzantine Empire a political entitythat once dominated the whole Mediterranean world after the romanemperor Constantine the Great had adopted Christianity anddecided, in 313, to transfer his capital from Rome on the Tiberto the antique city of Byzantium, on the Bosphorus. The newcapital was officially inaugurated in 330 under the name of NewRome, the city of Constantine, or Constantinople. In 1204 it wascaptured and looted by the crusaders, who established a Latinempire until the “Byzantines” expelled them in 1261 and restoredtheir previous empire. In 1453, this political entity ceased toexist after being conquered by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II.Nevertheless the city, today known as Istanbul, remained thecapital of an immense empire ruled by the Ottomans until the endof World War I and the dismantling of old European universalempires.

Short History of A Misunderstanding

The political role as well as the specific cultural influence ofsuch a long historical period is not sufficiently understood bythe modern educated public. Byzantium is regretfully a victim ofhistoriography. Lasting for eleven centuries and rich in its

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cultural heritage, Byzantine civilization has been denigrated andpejoratively judged. The term itself was used and popularized byFrench scholars of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu (1689 –1755), for example, worshiped immensely the ancient Greeks andRomans and refused to give such noble names to the empire inConstantinople. He preferred to call it “Byzantine” after thecity’s antique name, and inaugurated the traditional commonplaceof speaking about this historical era with the moral prejudice ofcorruption, cruelty, and decadence. The British scholar EdwardGibbon produced an account of the empire’s history where hecovered the entire Byzantine era. His title for the work, Fall andDecline of the Roman Empire, conveys a significant misunderstanding.

Urbs Romana and Romanitas

The citizens of this empire never realized, from 330 until 1453,that they were Byzantine. They knew themselves as Romans (romaioiin Greek; rum in Turkish; rumi in Arabic) and apparently theytook pride in their culture. They lived in different provinces ofthe Imperium Romanorum (Basileia Romaion); their homeland was theirPatria, in the modern sense of the word. Their land was known tobe the Domain of the Romans, or The Romania. Contemporary Arabchronicles called it Bilad al Rum (the Roman Lands) and sometimesmerely Rum (Rome). In the Chinese chronicles of that time, Rumis known as Ta-Tsin: the concept conveyed in this term is that ofthe final stage and destination of what we call today theSilkroad. It should be noted that in the Roman East, or ParsOrientalis, a cultural or sociological hiatus with late antiquitynever occurred. It instead happened in the Roman West, or ParsOccidentalis, due to the barbaric invasions and the ages thatfollowed in Western Europe. In the Pars Orientalis, things went on asusual, ever since Emperor Caracalla, in 212, granted Romancitizenship to all his subjects, or more precisely to all freepersons living in the empire.

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The Dower of Byzantium

Regardless of its pejorative and erroneous usage, the termByzantine nonetheless is helpful, for it identifies andcategorizes specific realities that Francois Thual (2004)pertinently calls “The dower of Byzantium.” We may recognizethree levels to this dower, and different boundaries and contentsto each of them.

Politics. Historically, the Byzantium flourished at the same era(330 – 1453) that found most of Western Europe ensnared withpoverty and violence. It was the economic hub of theMediterranean world, and stood at the political and culturalheart of Europe. It was Roman/Latin in its institutions and itsmanagement methods, Hellenistic/Greek in its culture, andSemitic/Judeo-Christian in its religion; this epitomizes thespecificity of Byzantium. In other words, we have here aninteresting historical combination of Latin legalism, Hellenicintellectualism, and Semitic realism.

Religion. The Byzantine civilization highly contributed to thedevelopment of Christianity and its philosophy. Some of itsheritage is shared, to a large extent, by all Christiandenominations. This is true, as shall be seen, concerning someissues related to the anthropological basis of this religioussystem. Since the separation that occurred in 1054 betweenEastern and Western churches, the Byzantine religious patrimonyis mainly the realm of eastern orthodox people in Central andEastern Europe, in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and far beyond,where different orthodox Diasporas live. Although deeply related,Orthodoxy and Byzantium can neither be interpolated nor confused.The whole of Orthodoxy is not all of Byzantium and vice-versa.

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Culture. This topic is of utmost importance for this chapter, andI shall remain on this specific level for the entire discussion.As I have mentioned above, the heart of this realm includes theself-assessment of its people, in Eastern Europe includingRussia, in the eastern Mediterranean, or generally belonging toeastern Christianity of multiple jurisdictions, either Orthodoxor Catholic, but certainly non-Latin and non-derived from themovements of Reformation. This cultural dower expands also intoWestern Europe. The development of Eastern and Western Europediverged due to cultural misunderstanding, and mainly on issuesthat I will address anon. Nevertheless, the Byzantium contributedin shaping Western imagination. It elaborated numerous figurativemodels of European art, and crucial concepts of Westerncivilization, like “the human person,” or the relations betweenReality and the modalities for its reproduction into paintings.Louis Brehier (1970, p. 479) observes that the whole Westernerudition remains indebted toward the immense achievements inphilology accomplished by Byzantine scholars. In some way, theByzantium can be considered as the missing or forgotten link ofWestern cultural identity. At the same time, right at itsoriental flank, the Byzantium transmitted its culture to theArab-Islamic culture. In many of its features, this latter is,more or less, Byzantine. This correlation is noteworthy for thehistory of science and the history of ideas. For example, medicalconcepts and also practical or institutional models of Arabicmedicine are Byzantine to a large extent, even though some oftheir own achievements surpassed these roots. RepresentativeByzantine and Arabic physicians and scholars, like the desertfather, Abba Macarius of Egypt (ca. 301– ca. 390), Ibn Bajja(Avempace: 1090 – 1139), or Gregory Palamas (1296 – 1359), shareroughly a similar non-dualistic anthropology, despite the factthat some Arabic prominent thinkers like Ibn-Sina (Avicenna: 980– 1037) or Abu’l Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd Al-Qurtubi(Averroes: 1126 – 1198) who planted some of the seeds of EuropeanRenaissance, remain closer to Antiquity’s dualistic ideas which

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transpired in their writings, rather than the Western scholasticculture of the Middle-Ages.

A Corporeal Mental Profile

Throughout the Mediterranean, Eastern and Western minds remainvery close to each other. They have the same roots; share acommon patrimony, and use the same symbols. Yet, they remaindifferent, which does not mean that they are contradictory or inmutual exclusive opposition. They are rather complementary. TheScholastic era, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment gaveWestern mind its specific features while Byzantine culture didnot go through the medieval academic turbulences of Nominalismversus Realism, known as the “Quarrel about Universals,” and noCartesian dualism would influence it. A Byzantine mind operatesless in modo geometrico but rather through images.1 It is, mutatismutandis, a craft of picture making. Its mental contents, itsgnoseological objects, are preferably iconic, i.e., meaningfulimages. In short, such a mind endeavors to be not polarized ortorn between two different categories of the same reality, likeform and substance for example. It does not systematicallyoperate through dual oppositions: It prefers the bipolarity ofboth “A and B” to the radically polarized “A or B.” Therefore, itremains on a more global level. In every aspect of its culturaland political life, Byzantium tried to keep this intermediaryway. Heated debates lasted for centuries all around the Byzantinedower to address critical issues about the constitutive unity ofthe soma-psyche (brain-mind, body-soul, flesh-spirit) and itsoperative modalities, although the debate took placepredominantly in a religious domain. Nevertheless, three mainanthropological points were identified and vigorously discussed:person, face, and will. The apparent realism of this cultureleads a modern Russian scholar, Oleg Klimkov (2001), to call it

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“Christian materialism.” This peculiar materialism is most likelythe best hidden but forgotten secret of Byzantium.

ANTIQUITY’S PARADIGM: DUALISM

Deeply influenced by the debates in modern dualism aboutsubstances, we seem unwilling to conceive the human individual asa finite (and as such, not self-sustaining) spatio-temporal orpsycho-physical unity. Human is seen as an accidentaljuxtaposition of a passive material extended substance (resextensa) and a subtle cognitive immaterial one (res cogitans). Themost difficult task seems to be able to tell how and why does theghost (viz. the soul) get into the machine (viz. the body). It isthe merit of Anglo-American cognitive neurosciences to move awayfrom such an uncomfortable position. Their apparentanthropological monism, focuses the attention on the material orphysical pole of this binomial problem. Matter is understoodtoday as an agglomerate of small parts (particles, either wave-particles or chords, all of which are no longer “material” in asensorial sense) or a network of their structures. The cognitiveand intellectual faculties are said to be dynamic processes andfunctional proprieties of such an agency. Such position, however,differs from other academic traditions of modern neuroscienceand, also, from the monistic position that was elaborated inByzantium as a solution to anthropological dualism.

Body-Soul: The Unsolved Problem

Celsius tells us that Hippocrates, in the fourth century B.C.,separated medicine and philosophy. Until the Hippocratic book OnSacred Disease, medicine was holistic and reflected a rathermonistic anthropology. Since then, “the partition between somatic

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and psychological diseases, the triumph of dualism and theemergence of the Stoic theory on passions as soul’s diseases aremajor events”2 of our civilization deeply rooted in theMediterranean world. Already at the time of Alcmeon of Crotona(ca. 520 – ca. 450 BC), remarking the importance of brain innervous and mental functions as well as the permanent and extrememobility of the soul (named from aiólos, Eolos, personified wind;cf., e.g., “aeolian energy”) was commonplace. Antiquity, too,reflected Plato’s dichotomy between the intelligible and thesensible worlds. Such ontological duality was both intellectuallyconceived and ethically perceived. Moral judgment is the heart ofdualism: the split arises as matter is seen as less valuable thanspirit. It is sometimes seen as bad and even demonized. Accordingto such ideas, the body is the soul’s prison. Therefore, the soulpre-exists to its corporeal envelope and is embodied orincorporated because of some dysfunction, error, or guilt. It wasaccepted that the soul “falls” into its miserable prison. Thesoul’s permanent mobility revealed its desire for liberation.

Aristotle’s De Anima shaped scholarly opinions about body-soulrelations, when the Greek Master formulated a criterion thatallowed one to discover whether or not the human soul isseparable from the body. He states, “if the soul performs anyactivity totally independent of the body, then its substance toomust be separable from any corporeal reality.”3 This statementcenters on Aristotle’s concept of substance, it has traveledthroughout Western culture, and can be considered the oldestformulation of what is called today the brain-mind problem, or inits more general framework, the “ontology of consciousness.”Influenced by Semitic realism, Byzantine culture kept asuspicious distance towards the notion of substance, which is acentral idea in any dualistic anthropology.

2 Pigeaud (2004, pp. 697-702), translated by Antoine Courban.1 Cf. section “Thinking in Images” in Carruthers (2003, pp. 72-77).

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From Chaos to Man

The cultural scenery at the end of Antiquity, when a new religionemerged in the Mediterranean world and a new capital of the RomanEmpire was founded, was dominated by such Hellenic views aboutreality that reflected the assumed dichotomy between sensible andintelligible worlds. Within the universe, all beings are said toexist either at random or by necessity. Regular behavior ofnature (Physis) as well as the incomprehensible arbitrariness ofchance (Týchee) are both immanent to reality. They are the pillarsof natural causality that dominates and submits to its absoluteand undisputable power all that exist: gods and men, animals andthings. The French scholar Adolphe Gesche (1993) interprets bothPhysis and Tychee to rule and steer the emergence (génesis) ofReality. They do not procreate Reality from nothingness. Instead,they pull it from the unbegotten primitive chaos (próton cháos)according to an inner need, an immanent mechanism of pure and“blind necessity” (anánche), “without any intervention of anintelligence, a god, or a craft (téchne).”4

Technical causality remains accidental, conventional, andartificial. Commonly seen on an inferior level under naturalcausality (physis, tychee, anánche), craft (téchne) can only consist inan imitative and artificial repetition (mímesis) of less valuethan natural anánche. Whatever humans may do, we remain submittedby natural constitution to such a necessity or fatum, in whichone is totally immersed. Human nature and freedom are notsymmetrical in meaning. Only in the ethical and political realmsis man capable to conquer some culture-expressing freedom. To doso, he must snatch it from the gods in a titanic and Prometheanproject where, in a constant ripple of guilt, he is threatened tofall into Hybris or immoderate excess. In this case, a terribleNémesis provokes the raging of natural forces against man.

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A Cosmic Soul

On this basic theme, different theories had been developed. Forthe Stoic philosophy of late antiquity, physis/Nature willprogressively be assimilated to the soul of the universe (animamundi), the pnéuma of a macrocosm conceived as some hugeorganism. The fundamental unity of this cosmic entity residesinto a permanent regularity, an immanent law, a Lógos Spermatikósthat rules the entire reality and pre-determines the whole courseof all its factual events. This is precisely destiny (Fatum). Itcontains all the seeds of individual fates, the spermatikoì lógoiwhich will exactly fill the function of Plato’s intelligibleIdeas. This theory was later to please Augustine (354 – 430), whowith utmost respect translated lógoi spermatikoì as rationes seminales(seminal reasons). Created by God all at once, they are to appearin due season, each when its appropriate time (kairós) comes inthe way that God had determined. As a distant echo to theseAugustinian ideas, Bonaventure (1221 – 1274) and Malebranche(1638 – 1715) will profess that, since creation became finishedin its first instant, nothing new will ever appear independentlyof such creative act.

Puzzling Unity of the Binomial Soma-Psyche

Besides their reflections on cosmology, the Greeks developedimportant views concerning mental faculties. Chiefly in thePlatonic line of thought, intellect was frequently understood asbeing passive and its development was perceived as the successivecontemplative dis-covering of preexisting intellectualrelationships. Although conflicting with the concept of freewill, this non-activity pervaded the most general academic viewof intellect. In the twentieth century, Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980)in Europe and, on a more local level, Christfried Jakob (1866 –1956) in South America broke with this scholarly tradition.

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Aristotle understood psychée (incorrectly translated as “the soul”in the Jewish-Christian meaning) as the form of a substance thatrestfully pre-exists in Plato’s intelligible world, prior to itsincorporation or descent into a somatic envelope, the physicalbody. During this embodiment process, the rational soul and itsthree faculties (imagination, reason, memory) are completed bythe irrational soul (sensation, desire, temper). Two majorconceptions predominately explained the origin of the individualsoul. For the Stoics it was a spark of the anima mundi, while forthe Neo-Platonists it was rather an emanation of an originalconsolidating unity, some godhead or divine principle (hénad).The relation of the mind to “mental mass” is similar, differingmainly in the understanding of the latter. Thus, man remains amicrocosm, a reproduction on a lesser scale of the macrocosm. Theanthropology of late antiquity was therefore rigorouslydualistic, with mind conceived as a spark or an emanation of whatis not itself the body. These ideas will be shared withvariations by prominent scholars such as Posidonius of Apamea(ca. 135 – 50 B.C.), Cicero (106 – 43 B.C.), the great physicianand philosopher Galen of Pergamon (ca. 131 – ca. 201), orPlotinus (ca. 203 – 270), and was later to permeate the Kaballah,a central scholarly body for the teachings of many contemporaryfollowers of this tradition.

The “unity” in this scenario set several notorious puzzles. Eversince Plato, explanations for the occurrence of episodic memoriesrequired some non-mental, material support, modernly calledengrams. As a matter of fact such a support was never found and,as a matter of concept, the modern views of the intellect'sdevelopment made it increasingly implausible that the recoveryfrom amnesias could depend on the possible restitution of sucherased, old cerebral traces. Yet the unity and coherence of thebinomial entity soma-psyche is addressed with many explicativetheories that consider individual pnéuma as some unifyingprinciple. In fact, considering the body and all its components

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as a tool for the soul, Galen understood pnéuma to be the soul'sfirst organ (próton órganon), a view which in itself is compatibleboth with dualism as well as with non-reductive, genuine monismas it is found in some current developments of neurobiology(e.g., Jakob's tradition as discussed below in chapter 12). Whilein the West the dualist conceptualizations evolved slowly and ona smaller divergence, in the Byzantine civilization theseconcepts were developed in greater contrast.

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR

When Christian thought spread throughout the Roman Empire, thisnew religion was soon confronted with the cultural environment ofHellenism. A scholarly work by Jaroslav Pelikan (1993, p. 368)shows how the momentous encounter between Christian thought andGreek philosophy reached a high-point in the fourth centuryByzantium, where the principal actors are four Greek-speakingscholars, the so-called Cappadocian Fathers or simply theCappadocians.5 Due to their immense achievements, Christianityhas been able to acquire some of the Hellenistic culturalheritage of antiquity in a selective manner. The impact of majornew concepts, as they were introduced by Semitic culture, willhave such a deep cultural influence that the Byzantine societywill denigrate the term “Hellenes” (i.e., Greeks) to qualify whatit called the “ancient errors” and, as I mentioned earlier, usedfor itself exclusively the name “Romans.” It is unfortunate thatthe controversies of that time are rarely familiar to theeducated public of today. For centuries, scholars as well aspolitical and religious authorities quarreled on religious groundto explain the person of Jesus of Nazareth, understood as a dualhuman-divine composite.3 From Aristotle’s De Anima, I, 1, 403 a 3-10, quoted by Verbeke (1985, p.454).

4 Gesche (1993, p. 59), translated from French by Antoine Courban.

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The Central Issue: Man’s Freedom

In the background of these debates stand anthropological issuesof utmost importance, such as the place of man in the universeand in relation to nature, the status of corporeality, the brain-mind connection or soma-psyche link, and the steady constitutivecoherence of man despite his combined ontic structure orconstituent heterogeneity. The most critical of these issues isindeed the ability of human mind to judge and decide; this is thereality of human individual freedom and, ultimately, humannormative responsibility. It is puzzling to notice how religiouscontroversies about Christology took place during centuries inByzantium within an atmosphere of extreme violence, sometimescivil wars and bloodshed. But when the outcome of a controversyis the constitutive freedom of man, no one would be surprised tosee the active role that any political power might play in thecontext of this quarrel. Such a feature may not be ignored in thecontext of neuroscience, especially for the assessment of itspresumably neutral results. Michel Foucault (1975) has ablyreminded us that coercive power is being exerted over bodies. Inother words, anthropology is also a major political statement,regardless of whether man’s image is philosophically conceived orscientifically built. Byzantium’s history and its so-called“Byzantine quarrels” paradoxically illustrate this situation.

Semitic Realism and Reversal of Anthropology

Reflecting upon the conceptual innovations introduced by Semiticculture, one would immediately think about the advent ofmonotheism. However, the idea of a single and unique god was notforeign to the Hellenic mind. The real cultural innovationconcerned two topics: man and reality. Due to the Judeo-Christianinfluence on Greek culture, the idea of substance and the idea ofnecessity were progressively re-visited and new meanings were

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given to them. The Semitic cultural contribution introduced atrichotomic or tri-polar anthropological conception. There arethree polarities in man: body/flesh (bâsâr), soul/psyche(nephesh), and spirit (rúah). For a Semitic mind, there can hardlybe some hiatus between these three topics and the Bible’santhropology may look rather ambiguous or lacking of rigorousdifferentiations. The Semitic concept of soul (nephesh) denotesall that has life and breathes. The word is applied to humans andanimals alike, either collectively or with distinctions. It hasbecome a central topic that allows one to distinguish between theliving and the dead, though it was not developed in order todistinguish between experiences inasmuch as they may be one’s andanother’s. Yet nephesh is not seen as a form, and its Semiticmeaning was soon to split into the Greek psyche. For a Semiticmind, nephesh/psychée refers also to “selfness” or “sameness”always positively conceived, i.e., whose non-alterity, or non-otherness is taken for granted from the very fact of itsexistence. In Arabic for example, a cousin language to Hebrew,

psyche connotes al nafs (Ar. س ف� This word is used to speak about (ال�ن�deepest and most subjective aspects of one’s individuality. The

modern Arabic expression ana nafsi ( ي�س ف� ا ن�� ن translates into “me (ا�myself” but its precise transliteration is “me-my-soul,” where“soul” is the most accurate reference for a living specificindividual.

The Unbreakable Wholeness of Man

The Hebrew tradition did not understand man other than anunbreakable wholeness, a global and yet specific individuality. Aholistic unity of body, soul, and spirit always refers to aperson. This unity is “his” or “her” basar-nephesh-ruah, one singlesubject which is expressed alike in the terms of soul and spirit.“Yet, these terms are not exact synonyms. Neither, however, can

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one infer a dualism between some higher self and lower self fromthe use of the terms” (Anderson 1982, p. 208). In this view, theconstitution of man as soul and body is hardly understood withoutthe ground of ruah. But the influence of dualism was too strongand the tri-polar Semitic conception led to a controversy betweentrichotomists and dichotomists both influenced by the Hellenicdualistic tradition. Dichotomists view man as made out of twodifferent substances enigmatically linked: a body and a soul-spirit. Trichotomists view also man as a juxtaposition ofdifferent substances uneasily joined together: a soma-psyche anda spirit. Appolinaris of Laodicea6, in the fourth century,understood the soul as being the intermediary link between bodyand spirit, thus playing the role of the stoic pnéuma as aprinciple of unity and coherence. Problems emerged because theconcepts (body, soul, spirit) became determinative of ontology,so that the “being” of the human person was expected to bederived from analytical reasoning. Sooner or later, and due toheated debates about the unity, in Jesus of Nazareth, of divineand human nature, a new concept emerged, the “hypostatic union.”We will encounter hypostasis further below, in the meaning thatone cannot separate the divinity and the humanity of this personinto different “compartments.” Let it be as it may, radical“trichotomism” had been rejected at a church meeting held inConstantinople in the middle of the sixth century. It took a longtime to establish a clear distinction between “duality” of being,where a modality of differentiation is constituted as afundamental unity, and “dualism” that essentially works againstsuch unity. As Emil Brunner (1939, p. 373) well says:“Ontologically, man is a unity. Phenomenologically, mind andnature, and specially mind and body are to be clearlydistinguished. This perception is addressed below in section “ANew Vision of Man”.

CROSSING THROUGH THE MIRROR

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Common to Judaism and Christianity, although more specific to thelatter, a new concept, “incarnation,” penetrated into theHellenistic culture. Incarnation referred to Jesus of Nazareth,understood as a human and divine composite. The relations betweenthe visible and the invisible were no longer seen as ruled by theclassical “incorporation” process (embodiment) but rather by theevent of “incarnation.” Matter does no longer incorporate/embodythe subtle soul/spirit, nor is it the spirit/soul that grasps thematerial flesh to take over a specific physical body. In commonpeople, the soul was presumably created in relationship with aconstant continuing parcel of nature, which in its biographicalsequence adopts a variety of biological organizations. Given thespecial circumstance of Jesus (viz. his divine attributes) hispresumed ontic kernel assumes a mind-body unity that alreadypossesses mind-body relationships. In the context of such mind-body relationships, “soul-hunting” now transforms into “flesh-grasping,” as this relates to the biological occurrence of agiven person rather than any different one. Souls were no longer“falling” into bodies but the exact opposite situation occurs:flesh/matter is now “ascending” toward the spirit. The directionof movement between the visible and the invisible is totallyinverted. By assuming such a reversal, the cultural imaginationof that time achieved something similar to Alice in Wonderland. Itcrossed to the other side of the mirror and undertook a newdescription of the world. There, the human being was understoodas a “living soul” and a “psychical body” (“empsyched” inAristotle’s terminology), and not perceived as a pure subtleevanescent form, or an intelligible idea caught in some materialprison like a “caged animal.” The body has now become the home ofa free soul, and is no longer viewed as its jail. Similarly, alsoconceptions about reality, nature, and man were deeplytransformed. Progressively, Mediterranean scholars built a newWeltanschauung that affected their culture until the scholasticintervention of the thirteenth century, which allowed Western

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Europe to move in a new direction and shape its culturalidentity. This new ground deeply affected medical conceptionsconcerning the brain-mind problem and conceptions about the placeof man in the world.

The Brain-Mind Problem and Byzantine Medicine

The period during which anthropology was reverted (fromapproximately the fourth to the seventh centuries) is known asthe “patristic era.” Some of the scholars who introduced the newconceptions were religious thinkers and are referred to as the“Founding Fathers” of the Christian church, or simply the“Fathers.” In a culture where nobody could have envisaged aseparation between religion and civil society, many of theseFathers served high ecclesiastical offices. I should mention thatthese were educated men who mastered the classical culture ofantiquity, and also its science, especially with regard tomedicine. Some of them were physicians, like Nemesius of Emesa(floruit late in the fourth century) or they studied medicine, likeGregory of Nyssa (ca. 340 – 394). Most of these scholars, if notall, referred to medical science or medical practice in order to

5 After a region in nowadays South-East Turkey called Cappadocia. JaroslavPelikan (1993, pp. 160-177), describes four Cappadocians, the two brothersBasil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, together with their sister andteacher Macrina, and their common friend Gregory of Nazianzus.

6 Apollinaris of Laodicea, is one of the most brilliant scholars of the 4th

century. He certainly was the first to formulate correctly what is known asthe “chrisotological problem”, i.e the rational understanding of therelations between human and divine natures in the individual Jesus ofNazareth. His teachings were condemned at the Second Ecumenical Council(381) held in Constantinople. He was the first to formulate the centralargument by stating that two perfect principles can not become one, thusallowing a better understanding, yet to come and to be achieved at theConcil of Chalcedon, of the unbreakable wholeness of what a person is.

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develop their discussions. The brain/mind issue was a familiarand commonly discussed topic in medical literature. A modernreader would be surprised to notice the constant presence ofphilosophical considerations in medical Byzantine literature.This fact prefigures what Xavier Zubiri proclaims: “Metaphysicsthat is not enough physical would cease to be what it is andconverts to logics and phenomenology.”7

The emergence of Christianity did not put an end to medicaldevelopment in Byzantium or later in the Islamic word. Inaddition to specific Christian philanthropy, the socio-medicaloutcome of the new anthropology and its focus on the psycho-physical wholeness and selfness of a human being led to thecreation, in the fourth century, of a healthcare institution, thenosokomeion or hospital,8 where monks and nuns attended to care-taking, and physicians practiced healing. This formula has provensuccessful throughout the empire, and beyond. Additional care-taking institutions were also implemented,9 with a deep influenceon Arab-Islamic civilization.10

Medicine and Dualism

Although creative and successful in its social dimension,Byzantine medicine did not improve medical science and research.It remained faithful to Galen and Hippocrates. In a way, we mightsay that it did not “cross through the mirror” and remained underthe influence of Hellenic dualism. Most likely, it could notintegrate the Semitic understanding of soul, because of itsdivorce with philosophy, especially on the ground of the soul’sdisease. For example, I have always been puzzled by thedistinction made between melancholia and acedia. Both terms refer toa depressive state, more or less severe and obscurely related tothe body. For Byzantine as well as for Arab medicine, melancholiais a general term used to speak about mental illness. Acedia (Gk:akedia, literally meaning caringfree: the don’t-care feeling, sloth)

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is rather a specific and concise medical term to indicate what wecall today the thoracic pain due to gastro-esophageal reflux,that might be avoided by standing upright or seated after mealsjust if it were not so much laborious that one much prefers tolay down. This is the point, and here enter brain-mindrelationships, or rather the unity in our outlook of the patient.Can we neglect that this preference is that which brings aboutthe thoracic pain? Nobody in Byzantine culture could have daredto do so. Thus acedia is also used in spirituality to speak aboutone of the seven deadly or capital sins, being often defined asspiritual laziness, putting off what God asks you to do, or notdoing it at all because of blindness to the present good. ThomasAquinas (1225 – 1274; Summa Theologica II-II, 35) summarized thedoctrine, as much Christian as Rabbinic and Muslim, by callingacedia the sadness in the face of some spiritual good which onehas to achieve. Thus, while melancholy was seen as a disease, adisturbance in the harmony of the Hippocratic bodily humors,acedia was considered as more specific to the soul. Stoicphilosophy already elaborated on this topic, building a medicaltheory that understands such soul’s diseases as passions. Thetheory is in perfect harmony with Aristotle’s assertion thatdisease is a state of mobility while health is a quiet state.11

Medical care of the soul (cura animarum) was now delegated toreligious circles. Still today, and especially in the Dower ofByzantium,12 monastic life is understood as a specific therapyfor the soul’s mobility and diseases.

The Anthropological Turning Point

The transfer of authority for soul-care from medicine to religiondid not lessen the interest of Byzantine physicians and scholarsin the brain-mind issue. They discussed abundantly the nature ofsoul, its relation to stoic pnéuma and to body, as well as thelocalization of psychic or mental functions in the nervous

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system. Some of the church fathers opposed the discussion ofthese matters. Some scholars, such as Origen of Alexandria (ca.182 – ca. 253), accepted the pre-existence of souls. Theprominent Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 335 – 390) writes about “uswho are captives of the earth … and clothed with the denseness ofthis flesh.”13 An eloquent and one of the most influentialscholars for this subject is Nemesius (late fourth century),physician and bishop of Emesa,14 with his treatise De NaturaHominis. The entire third chapter is devoted to body-soul union.He follows Galen’s anatomical and physiological ideas andlocalizes the three aforementioned faculties of the soul in thethree alleged known cerebral ventricles.15 Another physician,Posidonius, undertook around 390 experimental studies on thenervous system in order to localize mental functions.16

Apparently he did not succeed. The most significant figure in thescientific turning point is John Philoponus (ca. 490 – 575),17 aneminent but rarely known representative of Alexandria’s school.He discussed important brain-mind issues in his Commentary onAristotle’s De Anima (Verbeke 1985, pp. 451-470). Commenting theaforementioned famous Aristotelian causal criterion, “if the soulperforms any activity totally independent of the body, then itssubstance, too, must be separable from any corporeal reality,”Philoponus answers the Master: “if the soul is incorporeal, thepnéuma is so to speak its first home, but if it is corporeal itis identical with the pnéuma.”18 This is probably the mostexplicit turning point. It sounds as an echo to Ephraim theSyrian (ca. 306 – ca. 373), “see by experience that the soul onlyexists completely in the body.”19 We arrive here at a criticalissue of utmost importance: the“soul/psyche/mind/nephesh/spirit/self” is inseparable from aphysical body; it is unable to exist without a specialrelationship to its bodily structures. In other words, thisculture understood the unity of each human individual, hisdeepest “self,” the essence of his identity, as a specificpsychophysical finitude. This is probably how the human ontology

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of consciousness looked like when seen from the other side of themirror. Centuries later, upon the influence of Gabriel Marcel, inThe Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty would declare:“I am my body.”20 Such a modern statement, if quiteinsufficiently detailed, would have sounded very familiar andunexceptional to Byzantine scholars.

A NEW VISION OF REALITY

At the very heart of this emerging new Weltanschauung stand keyconcepts that I will now address, primarily the Byzantineperspective on Nature and causality. As for an ontology ofhumans, the core concept relates to Person in its internal modeof union.

Metamorphosis of the View on Nature: Tà Pánta

The History of Ideas in Late Antiquity is, therefore, plentifulof novel articulations. Even passing most of them up, here it isa must to make out the developments that changed key conceptssuch as nature, substance, causality and, specially, person. Arenovated idea of Nature appeared in early patristic times. Inits elaboration, the traditional word physis, which served tospeak in a holistic way about the world, gradually became out oforder to account for the new outlook about this very nature.Which technical word did substitute the old name, physis?Byzantine authors of the period prefer to talk of tà pánta or“All-Things.” Thereby they mean that their reflection centers nolonger on the uniformity but on the multiplicity of what is orexists. The term “nature” or physis, thus, does not denote anymorea common feature, instead it refers to a particular ousía ordifferent “substance.” Far from physis just denoting a shared modeof being, the authors of the period were stressing that realityis made of many physei (Pelikan 1993, p. 81). Each component of

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reality and, a fortiori, every living being is therefore understoodas constituted by a particular nature/substance. Yet, thesesignificant semantic changes did not bring agreement ininterpretation. Violent theological quarrels shook the Byzantineworld, particularly around the concepts physis, ousía, and prosópon.These quarrels iron-branded the Mediterranean Orient until ourdays.

Mode of Union

With the aim of furnishing the brain-mind problem with asatisfactory solution, especially in the context of Jesus ofNazareth, several general Councils were convened to findagreeable definitions about how a person is made. The mostimportant of the Councils was one arranged in Chalcedony in 451.While recognizing that any other human has a single specificnature, the Council proclaimed the hypostatic union that Jesus ofNazareth is “two natures in a single person.” Apolinaris ofLaodicea misunderstood this interpretation by failing torecognize that hypostatic union must not be understood as unionof soul and body. Rather, its correct perception is a union ofthe divine nature with another unity of human nature. The latterunity, in turn, consists of both a body and a unique non-substitutable psychée which, from such a body, interacts withnature.

Orders of Reality

Be it as it may, the most noteworthy facet of all thisdevelopment is the distance taken in it from the Aristotelianconcept of substance. Reality, globally seen, in this way is

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necessarily viewed as comprising a multiplicity of naturesdistributed on more than one order of presences:(1) The order of such a reality that is eternal: i.e., without

beginning or end. This order of reality is ascribed to theeternal Lógos, and

(2) The order of temporal reality, that of tà pánta, or All-Things. Inside of it, a reality of personal type and animpersonal reality may be distinguished. Each thing in thisorder of reality features a characteristic lógos. A number ofquandaries, of course, originated in this exclusiveattribution of the reality of personal type to the order oftemporal reality.

Through these conceptual tools it is also possible to grasp whatother key ideas denote, such as cósmos and aitía (cause). Thearticulation of those tools were to generate a true revolution ofconcepts such as causality and personal reality. In fact, whilenatural causality used to be understood as equivalent to the ideaof necessity, so that – in contrast – the imaginative andresourceful technical causality was seen as accidental, the newworldview was to overturn this conception. Here, technicalcausality was set before natural causality (téchne before anánche).It was understood that the eternal order of reality is that oftechnical causality, now seemingly more akin to the Lógos.Technical causality, therefore, became understood as what is thecause and foundation of All-Things. It becomes easy to understandwhy the Byzantine culture, either profane or religious, alwaysrefers to Lógos as the sole ruler of everything, or Pantocrator.

Within All-Things, and inside every being or every thing, the twotypes of causality (anánche and téchne) exist in differentdegrees. This bipolarity of temporal reality implies a dynamictension that may be termed “becoming.” Within temporal reality,viz. the reality that becomes, persons are such individualitiesthat manifest closest to poles of technical causality, made of

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imagination, inventiveness, creativity, and especially, will.This explains how freedom is constitutive to persons – althoughfreedom, of course, is not unbound by its surroundingcircumstances.

A NEW VISION OF MAN: PERSON AND FACE

Undoubtedly, the concept of person has a long history ofdevelopment. Its actual meaning seems so obvious for us, yet ittook many centuries to conceptualize an acceptable understandingof the obvious. Inherited from Greco-Latin antiquity, it wasfirst accepted by Christian culture, and then remodeled throughdifferent periods of secularization that are constitutive ofWestern European culture. Etymologically, the word personabelongs to the Roman legal realm and its theatrical practice ofphilosophy. It first used to designate, in a theatre, the actor’smask before acquiring the specific legal meaning that Cicerogives to it in his De officis. Many scholars establish a strictsymmetry between the Latin persona and the Greek prosópon that mayalso refer to some mask worn by an actor playing a character onthe stage. Yet, as Florence Dupont (2003, p. 39) observes, eventhough these terms refer to similar objects, they do not have thesame meaning. Speaking about the Roman actor, she understands himvia the theatrical persona, as being a faceless or featurelessorator (orateur sans visage). The prosópon is understood by DominiqueLecourt to hide the actor’s own face in order to substitute thefeatures of the specific character being played. The Latinpersona does not achieve the same substitution regardingpersonality features. It was more conceived as a speaking tube ora loudhailer. This is being rendered by its etymology per-sonare.Be theatrical practices as they may, a Latin mind preferred toreveal a specific behavior by hiding the actor’s features, thusunveiling a certain way of being of the played character. A Greekmind felt more concerned and preoccupied by the specific identity

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of that character. This is a crucial cultural issue in theunderstanding of images in both parts of the Mediterranean world.

The Knowing Points: Hic and Ibi

A specific identity is the starting point of being someone. It isa featured reality situated “here” (hic). From this “point” –this “here” – a specific individuality exists, can be known, andis able to acquire knowledge. This situated “point” (Goethe spokeof Mittelpunkt), which is an existential “here,” is related to, butnot the same as, its spacetime circumstance. In Byzantineculture, this source owing to which one is oneself, or endowingthe nephesh with “selfness” or “sameness,” is always positive.Since the considered, concrete nephesh is already existent, itsnon-alterity is taken for granted.21 Therefore, this sameindividuality is acknowledged as its own existence and not merelyan echo, to be found anywhere “there” (ibi). In this regard,concerning a character’s identity, the Hellenic mind is mainlyinterested in “what it is” and “what it looks like” where theLatin mind would focus more on “what it does.” This shading inmeanings seems significant for understanding some of thedifferences between Eastern and Western perceptions and theirrespective comprehension of a given reality. According toDupont,22 one might say that Atreus’ persona (mask), iratus Atreus, isnot the specific prosópon (face) of a furious and angry man named

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Atreus but, rather, the very features of a general behaviorcalled anger (ira). Even though the prosópon, or face, is not thewhole of a personal reality, it nevertheless both discloses andhides that same reality, which is the essence of the human being.As Lecourt shows, the Roman jurists used the word persona in ageneral way, or universal mode. The term did not qualify aspecific individual but rather was useful to legally attribute tothat person a social part in the civil codex they invented.Seemingly this is why until the modern era, a person and anindividual were not, lexically speaking, exact synonyms. It isinteresting to quote Boetius’ (sixth century) definition of aperson as “individual substance of rational nature.” It can befound in his Liber de persona et duabus naturis, and had a strikinginfluence on Western culture. Aristotle’s concept of substance isindeed the central issue of Boetius’ definition. Aquinas willlater on focus on this “rational nature” of man’s substance. Inhis conceptualization, which in the realism-nominalism spectrumqualifies as moderately realist, the nature of man consists inbeing a person. This task can rationally be achieved only bytotal submission to natural law that emanates directly from God.The concept of autonomy elaborated by the Enlightenment willreject this sort of submission to God’s will, although it upholdsunder natural law the concept of person and the subject ofModernity, and recognizes its physical and moral ground.

THE GROUND OF REALITY ACCORDING TO MAXIMUS

Most scholars will agree that Maximus of Constantinople, alsoknown as the Confessor, is the most prolific representative of aperspective that largely contributed to shape the Byzantine mind.Undoubtedly, he is the most prominent thinker of its culture.Maximus achieved a brilliant synthesis of patristic thought, thatalthough not unique for Byzantine culture, is probably the most

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complete and the most accurate one regarding matters pertainingto ontology and anthropology as well as to mind and body.

Valorization of Motion

At the core of our topic is a famous sequence, much dear toOrigen, who has utilized the following conceptual series toaccount for the passing into existence: stasis, kinesis, génesis. Origenattempted to show that the passing into existence is a movement,a perturbation of the original motionless state (stasis). Inconstrast, the new Weltanschauung, as reflected in the naturalsciences, was soon to revert this sequence into génesis, kínesis,stasis. Now, the passing into existence (contemporary physicistsspeak of microphysical particles enacted by the “vacuum”) is anact. This applies to human spirit, too. The positive sourceendowing the concrete nephesh with “selfness” or “sameness,” isthe enactment of this act. The very existence (génesis) is initself a dynamic (kínesis) in becoming, which tends toward a poleof permanent fulfillment (stasis).

Indivisible Unity of Nature and Will

This reversal was not achieved in Origen’s times but some fourcenturies later. The reversal is the lifetime work of Maximus,whose tormented days were an unrelenting struggle against themonothelite heresy. Monothelites wished to find a formula ofcompromise, by affirming that Jesus of Nazareth certainly has twonatures, but one single will. By it, monothelism dissociates thewill from the nature exactly like as Aristotle distinguished formfrom substance. Maximus went to the extreme of giving his life inorder to affirm the indivisible unity of flesh and will: thenature that constitutes the will and thereby freedom. ForMaximus, inasmuch as Jesus of Nazareth is a hypostatic union of

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two natures, clearly Jesus is also a hypostatic union of twowills. This is what is at the stake in Maximus’ outlook, as itcan be found in two of his writings of early maturity, plausiblycomposed sometime between 630-634: Ambigua ad Ioannem andQuaestiones ad Thalassium. Although Maximus’ vocabulary is extremelydifficult with a stony roughness, I present here a short summaryclosely following the analyses made by Dalmais (1952), Ponsoye(1992), and especially Larchet (1996a and 1996b).

Lógos and Lógoi

Acording to Maximus, Lógos is eternal and cause of All-Things,and is the source and purpose of every entity. The bosom of Lógosrecapitulates everything that exists, viz. All-Things. Lógos is“the union of what is determined and what is not determined, ofthe measured and the immense, of the limited and the unbound … ofrepose and motion.”23 Each existing reality has in its individualnature a lógos. The lógos of a being is its principle, its nature,what does define it, and what distinctively characterizes it. Butlógos is also the own finality of such a being: that in view ofwhich such a being exists. In sum, it is the entity’s raison d’êtrein a double sense, of source and also of purpose for its beingrather that not being. Maximus takes special care to make usseeing that these lógoi radically differ from Platonic ideas and,above all, should not either be taken as the Aristotelian forms,diverse from the matter which such forms inform.

Passing Into Existence: Becoming

Every entity is enacted by its lógos, which defines its nature or“being” (essence, from esse, being) and still also a lógos whichconditions its passing into existence.24 In other words, Maximus’

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logoí radically differ, not only from lógos physikós (physical lógos),but also from Platonic Ideas and from the Stoa’s logoí spermatikoí.This allows one to better understand the Maximian sequence:

– Génesis: eclosion of the particular lógos framed in itstemporal horizon, i.e, in its kairós (opportunity). Here, thisenactment to existence is the outgrowth either of technicalcausality or of the creative will of the eternal Lógos.

– Kínesis: movement of existence, or becoming. The cause ofthis movement or of this becoming is a temporal sequencewhere the future does act on the present, as it frequentlyis acceptable to Platonisms. In this particular frame ofPlatonist ideas, some modern physicists employed conceptssuch as futur antérieur (Constantin de Charrière) or “advancedaction” (John A. Wheeler and Richard Feynman (1949) claimedthat back-action is caused by advanced waves propagatingbackward in time from the future absorption of theradiation, John G. Cramer (1986) developed upon it a“Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” and thenotion is also embraced by Huw Price (1996), Peter Holland(1995), Szirko (2005), and others. This anticipative causeis also found in the eternal Lógos.

– Stasis: repose by fulfilment of the project or by realizationof the model

.Enacting the Lógoi

The logoí of the particular entities are manifestations of Lógos'will and are not particles of divine essences. Rather thansparkles of the divine intellect, they are “volitions,”“voluntary acts,” or “grains of alterity.” This is why, as weshall see below with Gregory Palamas, the essence of God is to beclearly distinguished from his uncreated energies. The pre-existence of all logoí in the Lógos means the profound unity of allentities in their principle and likewise, every entity thatexists or is about to exist possesses a specific and particular

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lógos. Thereby both, the diversity of All-Things and theparticularity of every entity, is founded in the eternal Lógos.This interpretation by Maximus, where he values every particularentity thoroughly contrasts with both: (a) Plato’s model wherethe particular appears as a descent and a deterioration of theuniversal (Ideas or Essences), and (b) Origen’s model, who –under the influence of Neoplatonism – sees the multiplicity ofrational entities as resulting from a dispersion or decompositionof a supposed original hénad.

Unity as the Ground of Diversity

For Maximus unity and diversity coexist inside every samereality: the Lógos is present in the multiple logoí, the multiplelogoí are grounded at their foundation in the Lógos.25 The coming toexist, in the physical instant, is an eclosion and every eclosionpossesses a temporal horizon, a kairós, which is its own. ForMaximus, repose could not be the primitive condition of temporalrealities. By principle, only God is immutable; everything thatexists is essentially mobile. Motion ensues the passing intoexistence. In contrast, Origenists see motion in comparison withthe primitive condition of repose, as an act of decomposition.For Maximus, movement and temporality are ontologically featuredby non-divine entities. This allows for finitudes to have abeginning. Even when a human being reaches a condition of reposeby “filling the space that separates the lógos of its beginnngfrom the lógos of its end,”26 such a human does not decrease hisor her condition of “repose in perpetual motion” (aiekinètosstasis).27 Amazingly, this is what happens to Alice on the otherside of the mirror: she feels she must keep running in order toremain at the same place.

The Exploration of Will: Lógos and Trópos

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If the Lógos, for Maximus, does work as a sort of principle ofnature, this does not render the world a gigantic automaticmechanism, with everything rigorously determined. This isprevented inasmuch as each personal lógos or principle does itswork tied to the trópos or mode.28 Jean-Claude Larchet (1996b, p.143) counted seventy occurrences of the dyad lógos-trópos in thetwo writings by Maximus mentioned above. While the lógos definesthe nature of an entity, this entity’s tropos is the fact of itshypostasis: a fact that manifests its capacity of self-determination. This means the possibility for everyone of livingin conformity with his or her lógos, namely as per his or hernature, or either in opposition to his or her lógos and contranature. This scenario frames and poses the problem of will.

In order to account for free will, Maximus uses several concepts,frequently difficult to tell apart. For a summary assessment, Iwould say that Maximus shows that what we call “will” may beunderstood in different connotations, to name gnomè, thélesis, andtheléma. Gnomè is a disposition of nature to self-determination.Thélesis, in contrast, is the actual capacity of the individual towork out voluntary choices. Maximus also utilizes the termtheléma to denote the individuation of the thélesis or the gnomè. Bythis ability of individuation, Maximus seems to open the way forexistential temporality. In his view, being (einai) belongs tohuman by nature and is related to one’s lógos, whereas properbeing (eu eínai)29 is related to, or rather proposes to,30 one’sfree will.31 The latter is tributary to one’s hypostasis andrelated to one’s trópos. The lógos of human is originally disposedto this being-proper,32 but is not determined. The attainment ofwellness is a work of the particular human being, enacted when heor she decides to live by the idea of good – viz. in harmony withone’s one moral conscience.

STAKES OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL MONISM: THE PALAMITE CONTROVERSY

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The indissoluble unity of the human being is to bear considerableconsequences on the ensuing developments of Byzantine culture. Asan example, I will briefly address “The Palamite Controversy,”33

deployed in the fourteenth century and decided in a Councilconvened in Constantinople in 1341. The subject of thiscontroversy was the body. It consisted in ascertaining whetherthe physical body was in conditions of participating in prayer,or if prayer is a meditative entreaty of the soul. Protagonistsincluded for one side the hesychast monks, led by Gregory Palamas(1296 – 1359)34; and on the other side scholar Barlaam ofCalabria (1290 – 1348). The hesychast monks had been affirmingthat, because of their way of living, they were able to achieve astate of permanent prayer (hesychia35) engulfing their whole being– body and soul together. In such particular state, these menreported particular experiences which, to our modern eyes, mightbe categorized as bodily transparence. They averred to seeing anintense light, which they interpreted as the uncreated energy ofGod present within every reality that is regarded as finite. Thisshould be distinguished from the Western mystical extasis which,somehow, typically withdrew from contemplation any sensibleexperience that a person can have in such state. For hesychasts,in contrast, the state of permanent prayer in no way was passive,and it did not thwart the prosecution of sensory-perceptualactivity. In other words, it was understood that the sensiblefaculties of the body are not an obstacle for the consciousnessthat one might achieve about God in his energies. Thehesychasts36 clearly distinguished between God’s essence,unknowable and not-participable, and the uncreated energies ofGod deemed present in everything that exists. This is why, suchenergies were considered knowable and participable by way ofsensible experience. Barlaam’s critiques against the hesychasts,jointly with the replies contributed by Gregory Palamas, composean important moment in the history of ideas, apt to enlightenwhat distinguishes the Mediterranean Orient from the Occident. At

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bottom, Barlaam spoke in the name of a dualist anthropology.37

The arguments which he utilized can only be comprehended in theframe of the controversy that ensued at the same time in theNominalism/Realism debate concerning the issue of universals.Gregory Palamas expressed himself in the name of a genuinelymonist anthropology, and consequently could not have excluded thebody from the state of prayer. In his view, the noetic and thediscursive faculties of man express themselves, while the bodycontinues to functioning itself. Such simultaneity was rejectedby Barlaam. The quarrel was of a religious nature, but theoutline of the controversy interests us here because the Councilheld in Constantinople condemned Barlaam in 1341 and officiallyadopted the standpoint of his adversary, Gregory Palamas. Thisdecision shaped the Byzantine world, some decades before the endof the Eastern Roman Empire, and in some way rejected dualism infavor of two positions that are central for this discussion:anthropological monism, and the proclamation of the presence ofGod’s uncreated energies in every thing and every entity of tapánta. Such “uncreated energies,” in Palamas’ terms, are similarto Maximus’ logoí and, in the Byzantine view, are responsible forwhat makes one not another.

SYNTHESIS:UNDERSTANDING THE BYZANTINE ONTOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Without accounting for all the data in the Barlaam-Palamasargument, I attempted to demonstrate the essential variables forthis tome’s topic, the ontology of consciousness. It is now timeto employ a modern vocabulary to summarize the essential pointsof the preceding discussion. Mindful of technical language fromearly theological considerations, a specific outlook on realityand human beings can be portrayed and rendered into present-daylanguage.

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(1) There is a reality without a beginning and without an end.This includes the specific domain of pure consciousness. Onemay call it God if this concept seems convenient. This self-consciousness is not a mathematical formula, it is anenactment, and that is why all causality in this domain is atechnical one, in the sense of creativeness, an expression offree will. This can be resumed by stating that the domain ofconsciousness is also personal.

(2) There is another order of multiple realities, each of themhaving a starting point grounded in the previous one. This canbe said the domain of “progressive sentience” or “becomingconsciousness.” These ontological agencies, are able inundergoing inner development, and yet they are not arranged ona vertical or ladder-shaped axis. This order of reality isdynamic and causality in this domain is diversified. It goesfrom blind deterministic necessity to free will. Naturalcausality does not steer everything. Living and mindfulcreatures are less submitted to it than solely mineralmaterials.

If these multiple realities are to be understood “vertically,”they emerge from each other in a continuous transformativeprocess (“procession”) steered by some law of necessity. Time isa general continuous frame for such a process. From this point ofview, “one” and “another” are synonyms in a temporal sequence.

If such realities are to be seen “horizontally,” each of them isrooted by its own ontological principle – its Maximian lógos – inthe eternal Lógos. This would exclude any transformation, butwould imply a vision where the very notion of evolution is anevolution of individual time and not of some morphologicalsequence. Time is discontinuous, and there is a gap, a hiatusbetween each sentient agency. This is why “one” is not “another,”

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in the case of fully sentient and fully self-conscious physicalaction.

Sailing to Byzantinum

Byzantine culture sounds like an anachronism for modern ears. Itis worth revisiting with modern eyes and vocabulary. Under theashes of obsolete Neoplatonist vocabulary one can see realitywith different eyes, and be surprised by the hidden modernity of38 Quoted from The Literature Network,http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781/. This poem is considered as oneof the masterpieces of the Irish poet. It was first published in 1927 in hiscollection October Blast, when W. B. Yeats was in his sixties.

***********

References

Anderson, Ray (1982), On Being Human - Appendix A. Body, Soul, Spirit, Grand Rapids:Williams B. Edermans Publishing Co.

Aristote, Problèmes, VII, 4 ( éd. Louis, p. 124 ),Ávila, Alicia, and Mario Crocco (1996), Sensing: A New Fundamental Action of Nature,

Folia Neurobiológica Argentina, Vol. X, Institute for Advanced Study,Buenos Aires, 1996.

Brehier, Louis (1970), Culture et Civilisation, Vol. 3 in Histoire et Civilisation de l’EmpireByzantin, 3 vols, Paris: Seuil, Coll. Patrimoine de l’Humanité.

Brunner, Emil. (1939), Man in Revolt, England: Guilford.Carruthers, Mary (2003), The Craft of Thought. Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images

400-1200, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Vol. 34, New York:Cambridge University Press.

Cramer, John G. (1986), The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 58, pp. 647-688, July, http://mist.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html/.

Dalmais, Irénée-Henri (1952), La Théorie des logoï des créatures chez Saint Maxime leConfesseur [The Theory of Creatures’ Logoï according to Saint Maximus the Confessor],Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, Vol. 36, pp. 244-249.

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http://mist.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_toc.html

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781/


Byzantine culture and its amazing realizations that are inperfect harmony with current perspectives on consciousness. Here,one can notice to which extent the senses are ontologicallyactive and participate in shaping a moral world. This has beeneloquently stated by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) in hisfamous poem Sailing to Byzantium:38

That is no country for old men […]

Dupont, Florence (2003), L’acteur romain, orateur sans visage [The roman actor, a featurelessspeaker], quoted by Dominique Lecourt in Bioéthique et Ethique Medicale, ResPublica, Nov. 2003, special issue, Paris, Presses Universitaires deFrance (PUF).

Ellverson, Anna-Stina (1981), The Dual Nature of Man. A Study in the TheologicalAnthropology of Gregory of Nazianzus, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis – StudiaDoctrinae Christianae Upsaliensis, 21, Uppsala: Uppsala University Press

Foucault, Michel (1975), Surveiller et Punir [Watching and Punishing], Paris: EditionsGallimard.

Fox, Clifton R. (1996), What if anything is Byzantine, Celator, Vol 10, No. 3, March,Krause Publications, quoted in: http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01/.

Gesche, Adolphe (1993), L’Homme [Man], Paris: Editions du Cerf.Grmek, Mirko D. et al (1993), Storia del pensiero medico occidentale, Vol. I: Antichità e

medioevo [History of Western Medical Thought, Vol I: Antiquity and Middle-Ages], Rome -Bari: Laterza.

_____ (1996), Histoire de la pensée médicale en occident, vol I: Antiquité et moyen âge,Paris : Seuil.

Haldon, John F. (1990, 1997), Byzantium in the Seventh Century. The Transformation of aCulture, Cambridge – New York: Cambridge University Press.

Holland, Peter (1995), The Quantum Theory of Motion - An Account of the DeBroglie-BohmCausal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge.

Hunke, Sigrid (1960), Allahs Sonne über dem Abendland [Allah’s Sun Shines on the West],Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt.

Issa, Bey A. (1981), Tarikh al-bimaristanat fi al-Islam [History of Hospitals in Islam],Beirut: Dar al-Raïd al-‘Arabi.

ك�، ي� سي ب�� ،1981ع�ي� ي� �ب� د ال�عر ، دار ال�ران�� ي�روت( س�لام، ب�� ي� الا3 اة( ف� ان�� مارس�ي( �خ� ال�ب اري�� ، ن�(Courban 37


http://www.romanity.org/htm/fox.01


An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.

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Conclusion

Influenced by Semitic realism, Byzantine culture kept asuspicious distance toward the Aristotelian notion of substance,which is a central idea in any dualistic anthropology. In the“Eastern Imperium Romanorum” (Basileia Romaion, Bilad al Rum), aninteresting historical combination of Latin legalism, Hellenic

de Crotona ocho siglos después de su muerte?” Investigación # 6773,Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Buenos Aires; precis in “Guíade Invest. en curso en la Universidad de Buenos Aires vol. II”, 1984:Instituto Bibliotecológico of the University of Buenos Aires.

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Pelikan, Jaroslav (1993), Christianity and the Classical Culture. The Metamorphosis of NaturalTheology in the Encounter with Hellenism, New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress.

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Pigeaud, Jackie (2004), Maladie [Disease], trans. Antoine Courban, in DominiqueLecourt, Dictionnaire de la Pensée Médicale [Dictionary of Medical Thought], Paris:Presses Universitaires de France (PUF).

Ponsoye, Emmanuel and Larchet Jean-Claude (1992), Saint Maxime le Confesseur:Questions à Thalassios [Saint Maximus the Confessor: Questions toThalassios], Paris: Editions de l’Arbre de Jessé.

Price, Huw (1996), Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time,Cambridge, MA: Oxford Unversity Press.

Samiraï (al) Kamel. (1990), Moukhtassar tarikh al-tibb al-‘arabi [Short History ofArabic Medicine] 2 vols, Beirut: Dar al-Nidal.

ال1990ال�سامي�راءي� ك�ام�ل، ض� ، دار ال�ن� ي�روت( ، ب�� Hان �ان� ، ك�ي( ي� �ب� خ� ال�طب� ال�عر اري�� صر ن�( ن( ، م�خ�Secretan, Philibert et al. (2002), Introduction à la pensée de Xavier Zubiri [Introduction to

the thought of Xavier Zubiri], Paris: L’Harmattan.Sherwood, Polycarp (1995), The Earlier Ambigua of St Maximus the Confessor, Rome:

publisher

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intellectualism, and Semitic realism took place. Upon the first,individuals were primarily defined by their social roles; uponthe second, by their common features; and the third stressed aconcrete, fleshed personal unity. In this regard, Semitic realismcounterbalances the other two. However, in the context of thetheme for this discussion “Why One is not Another,” it holds thecreation-history of the existentiality sufficient to tell how andwhy does the ghost (viz. the soul) get into the machine (viz. the

Sorabji, Richard (http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/A021.htm)Szirko, Mariela (2005), Why is Time Frame-dependent in Relativity? Minkowski's spacetime as a

Kantian 'condition of possibility' for relativistic calculations, Electroneurobiología Vol.13 , No. 3, pp. 181-237;http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002462/

Temkin, Owsei. (1931), Das ‘Brüderpaar’ Philagrios und Posidonios, SA, 24 , pp, 268–270.

Thual, François. (2004), Le Douaire de Byzance [The Dower of Byzantium], Paris:Ellipses.

Todd, Robert B. (1984), Philosophy and Medicine in John Philoponus’ Commentary on Aristotle’sDe Anima, cited in op. cit. Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, p.108.

(1984) Symposium on Byzantine Medicine, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XXXVIII Verbeke, G. ( can’t find the first name ). (1985), “Levels of human thinking

in Philoponus,” in C. Laga et al., After Chalcedon, Orientalia LovaniensiaAnalecta, Vol. 18, Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, pp. 451–470.

Wheelerm, John Archibald and Richard Phillips Feynman (1949), ClassicalElectrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action, Rev. Mod. Physics, Vol. 21,No. 3, July, pp. 425–433.

Yeats, William Butler (1927), Sailing to Byzantium, http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781/.

7 It is in fact a statement made by Ignacio Ellacuria and reproduced byXavier Zubiri. Quoted from Secretan et al. (2002, p. 67). Translated fromFrench by Antoine Courban.

8 The creation of the hospital may be traced to Basil, bishop of Caesarea,who in 375 implemented the first known nosokomeion within the walls of apublic inn or xenodocheion. He engaged irregular monks and nuns of his

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http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002462/

http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/A021.htm


body). Definitely this view could not have been narrow enough tounderstand the creation-history as a mere record of theinteractive brain-mind exchanges. The process to disengage fromPlatonist assumptions was slow – indeed millenarian – and chieflyachieved by two first rate scholars, Maximus of Constantinople,or the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, who without throwingaboard any essential element, conceptually articulated anindisputable anthropological monism. They may have left the

jurisdiction to take care of sick people. This measure is considered to bethe original formula of paramedical professions.

9 A network of such public institutions existed in Byzantium: ptochiia for thepoorest, orphanotrophia for orphans, brephotrophia for abandoned children,gerontokomia for elder people, etc. See Lichtenhaeler (1973) and Miller(1997).

10 For further references see Issa Bey (1981), Samiraï (1990), Hunke (1960).11 Aristote, Problèmes, VII, 4 (éd. Louis, p. 124 ), quoted in Grmek (1996, p.219).

12 In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, a Byzantine monk of the dualisttradition, carefully classified such diseases of the soul and wrote abouttheir healing. His nosology is still extremely popular among easternmonastic circles. It lists the following diseases: Philautia (self-love),Gastrimargia (gluttony), lust, Philargyria-Pleonexia (cupidity-meanness), sadness,Akedia (sloth), anger, fear, Kenodoxia (vanity), and pride. Cf. Larchet (2000,pp. 845-848).

13 Quoted in Ellverson (1981, p. 27).14 The modern city of Homs, on the Orontes river in today’s northern Syria.15 Outes and Crocco (1981-1984): This ancient connection makes a capital stagefor the conceptual itinerary of Western neuropsychiatry, being surprisinghow the monk Chalcidius could have been able to access theneuropsychological knowledge acquired by Alcmeon eight centuries before.This knowledge differs, on some essential notions, from the views ofAristotle and other subsequent physician-naturalists. The conceptual path ofChalcidius situates him in a project probably set off by Ossius of Cordobafor achieving an integral synthesis of the human knowledge about nature.Involved is the theory of ventricular pneumatism. Memory is localized in the

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process incomplete, although not less advanced than someappreciations of brain-mind issues in some sectors of ourcontemporary academe.

Notes

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Abbot and monks of the Benedictine Monasteryof Chevetogne in Belgium, who welcomed me in order to prepare this chapter. My thanks go

posterior ventricle, imagination in the middle chamber and sensation in theanterior one. Arabic medicine will abundantly elaborate on this theory:examples are Razi and Ibn Baja.

16 Lewy and Landesberg (1847, 1848). Quoted in: Symposium on Byzantine Medicine,Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XXXVIII (1984, p. xii). See also Temkin (1931, pp.268-270).

17 It is not well established if he practiced medicine or ever studied it,although being a professor of literature in Alexandria (grammatikos). He wasa Neo-Platonist who adopted the Christian religion. He was condemned by hiscolleagues for criticizing Proclus and Aristotle on the eternity ofuniverse. He was accused, by historiography and because of his conversion toChristianity, of being opportunistic after the emperor Justinian closedAthens’ philosophical school in 529. According to Richard Sorabji(http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/A021.htm): “In dynamics, the idea ofan impetus, which in its medieval context has been hailed as a scientificrevolution, can be seen to have traveled by an Arabic route from the 6th

century commentator Philoponus. Galileo in his early works mentions

Philoponus more often than he mentions Plato. As for Brentano, in the 19th

century, got from the commentary tradition, and not from Aristotle himself,his idea that all activity in the mind is directed towards intentionalobjects.” See also McKenna (1997, p. 157).

18 Cited in Todd’s communication, quoted from Symposium on Byzantine Medicine

(1984), p. 108.19 Ephraim the Syrian, Nisibean Hymn 11:4. Quoted in: Papademetriou (n.d.)http://www.new-ostrog.org/palamas.html

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specially to Rev. Antoine Lambrechts, the librarian, who let me consult freely the pricelesscollections of his scriptorium, and to Rev. Michel Van Parys for his valuable counseling inpatrological issues.

I also thank Pr. Assad Kattan for his help in understanding Maximus’ thought. I am indebted toPr. Amale Dibo, from the American University of Beirut, who kindly accepted to read mymanuscript in both versions, French and English.

20 English translation by Colin Smith, with corrections by Forrest Williamsand David Guerri’ere (1981, p. 203). Merleau-Ponty adds, “the theory of thebody schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception” (p. 206) in which “ourown body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps thevisible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains itinwardly, and with it forms a system” (p. 203).

21 Cf. Ávila (1996). It thus does not appear to differ from what makes it notanother, i.e., the enactment of this creation as different in each case,stressed in the aforementioned neurobiological tradition where non-alterityis not automatically taken for granted (because non-existentexistentialities are also considered). Therefore, in each enactment, aspecial determination is focused. With such a focus, the spatio-temporal circumstance denotes a determination that points to orreveals the existential here, which is called oneself.

22 Lecourt (2004, pp. 857-859). I follow Dominique Lecourt through the wholediscussion of this issue about the person.

23 Ponsoye and Larchet (1992, pp. 10-13), translated from French by AntoineCourban.

24 Qu. LX, PG 90, 625A, LS2 81. Some readers may want to know that allPatristic texts are cited, after Larchet 1996a & 1996b, from the Jacques-Paul Migne Collection. Qu: stands for Quaestiones ad Thalassium followed by thenumber of the question in Roman characters; PG stands for Patrologia Graecafollowed by number of the volume, page, letters of columns, and lines.

25 Ibid., quoted in Ponsoye and Larchet (1992, p. 12).26 Ponsoye and Larchet (1992, p. 13).27 Qu. LIX, PG 90, 608D, LS2 53 and Qu. LXV, PG 90, 760A, LS2 285.28 On lógos-trópos according to Maximus see Sherwood (1955, pp. 164-8).

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29 Qu. XXXV, PG 90, 380AB, LS 241.30 Qu. LV, PG 90, 545BC, LS1 495.31 Qu. II, PG 90, 272B, LS1 51.32 Qu. XL, PG 90, 396A, LS1 267.33 Cf. the following entries in the Oxford Dictionnary of Byzantium (1991): “Barlaamof Calabria,” “Palamas Gregory,” “Palamism,” “Hesychasm,” and “Hesychia.”

34 op. cit., p. 1560.35 op. cit., p. 924.36 op. cit., p. 923.37 op. cit., p. 257.

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Why One is not Another. Brain-Mind problem in the Byzantine culture

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