Both the early Syriac poets and the field of cognitive science hold fast to a unity of body and mind, and both understand metaphor to be essential to our conceptual understanding. It may seem odd to bring together an ancient group of Christian writers and a contemporary naturalistic philosophy of language and meaning, but each has more in common with the other than scholars working in either field probably realize. The poetry of Ephrem the Syrian and other early Syriac poets reveal unusual views of the relationship between body and soul, and their unhellenized aversion to defining God led them to embrace a “theology of paradox” largely through metaphor. Similarly, in the field of cognitive science the mind is inherently embodied, and concepts are largely metaphorical. By studying the similarities in these disparate and often misunderstood fields, one may attain a better appreciation of the importance of metaphor, the usefulness of non-objectivist thought, and acquire some new perspectives on the relationship between the mind and the body. ~Micah Hayes, The New Pantagruel

Read the entire article, The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science, the latest addition at tNP. Also new at tNP is Stephen Gardner’s Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire.

I have some quibbles with the claim that the Christology of the Church of the East did not have much to do with Nestorios or at least with what was considered Nestorianism by all other Christians (by the sixth century, to be ‘Mopsuestian’ in your Christology, a label that scholars of the Church of the East do accept, was to be as good as Nestorian, and the Fifth Ecumenical Council said as much), but that need not take away from the rest of the article.

There are other things I have to say in another post about the supposed Hellenic-Semitic opposition and the shared “theology of paradox” that would have united Ephrem with the very “Greek” Cyril of Alexandria and the late fifth century Armenian catholicos John Mandakuni. Understanding human nature as an integral unity of body and soul, as Syrian, Armenian and Greek traditions all do, does stand in marked contrast to all Platonising anthropologies that have cropped up in Christian history, and we would do a disservice to Greek patristic thought if we mistook its use of Greek philosophical categories for a sharp opposition to paradox, symbol and metaphor.

The use of anagogic symbolism in Pseudo-Dionysios, one of the most “Neoplatonic” and “Greek” patristic sources of late antiquity, surely shows the potential for similar sorts of apophaticism in Greek and Syrian traditions. Ps.-Dionysios’ On the Divine Names approaches the divine attributes and names in a way not that dissimilar from the citations from Ephrem in the article. That the hesychastic tradition, broadly defined to include the long ascetic tradition of the Orthodox Church, understands spiritual life in terms of embodied transformation and the unity of mind and heart also points to the same understanding of the relationship between body and soul in later, largely Greek, Orthodox ascetic theology.

These reservations having been noted, I still recommend the article as a refreshing effort to return to patristic sources to reacquaint ourselves with an integral and sane understanding of human nature and the human person along the lines I hinted at in my own Pantagruel essay earlier this year.