That's helpful, thank you. I'm not actually unfamiliar with Orthodox philosophy-- I just hadn't encountered that specific way of talking about thoughts and the thinking mind in Orthodox literature (or if I have I've forgotten it).
FWIW, I spent a bit of time studying Orthodox theology a few years back. Mainly through articles and podcasts on Ancientfaith.com, but I also have a few books, including Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Michael Pomazansky. More than anything else, it prepared me to study Plato and his successors, because it introduced me to the concept of the nous! Eventually I realized that I had misunderstood a great deal of both Western Christian philosophy, and of Neoplatonic literature, because I didn't realize that nous was originally translated into Latin as intellectus, and that the convention was to render both nous and intellectus as "intellect" for a very long time. Later, of course, the English "intellect" came to mean the same thing as the Latin "ratio," or reasoning mind, which is (I'm fairly sure) Greek "dianoia"-- a very different concept from "nous" as understood both in Christian and Platonic writings.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2021-03-10 10:42 pm (UTC)FWIW, I spent a bit of time studying Orthodox theology a few years back. Mainly through articles and podcasts on Ancientfaith.com, but I also have a few books, including Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Michael Pomazansky. More than anything else, it prepared me to study Plato and his successors, because it introduced me to the concept of the nous! Eventually I realized that I had misunderstood a great deal of both Western Christian philosophy, and of Neoplatonic literature, because I didn't realize that nous was originally translated into Latin as intellectus, and that the convention was to render both nous and intellectus as "intellect" for a very long time. Later, of course, the English "intellect" came to mean the same thing as the Latin "ratio," or reasoning mind, which is (I'm fairly sure) Greek "dianoia"-- a very different concept from "nous" as understood both in Christian and Platonic writings.