What is the Mind & How Did We Lose It?
by Joseph Pearce, The Imaginative Conservative:
Any keen and realistic observer of our deplorable epoch will know that modern society seems to have lost its mind. In these disintegrating times it appears that anything goes because nobody knows the value of the permanent things upon which all civilized societies are built. Since this is so it might be helpful to remind ourselves of what exactly is the mind so that we can understand how we lost it and, more to the point, how we can find it again.
Before proceeding to a discussion of the mind from the perspective of an orthodox Christian understanding, we should spend a little time summarizing other definitions of it. For Plato, “mind is the attribute of the gods and of very few men;” it is that which has knowledge of the eternal verities, or the permanent things. It is also that which “sets everything in order and arranges each individual thing in the way that is best for it.” Mind is, therefore, for Plato, an omniscience, inherent to the gods, which manifests itself in the divine order of the cosmos. Insofar as any man divines this divine mind that orders the cosmos he can be said to be of one mind with Mind itself. Such unity between the mind of man and the mind of the gods is the wisdom that true philosophers possess.
Aristotle introduces an incarnational dimension to mind insofar as he links it to sense-perception. The knowledge that the mind possesses is gained through the use of the senses. It is, however, not subject to this knowledge but transcends it because it has the potential to be or become “whatever is thinkable”. He also distinguishes between the passive mind which “is what it is by virtue of becoming all things” and the active mind which “is what it is by virtue of making all things”. Whereas the passive mind is mutable and mortal, capable of being destroyed, the active mind is immortal and indeed eternal. The mortal or passive mind is an attribute of man; the immortal and active mind is an attribute of the gods. As with Plato before him, Aristotle would see the unity between the mortal mind of man and the immortal mind of the gods as the wisdom that true philosophers possess. In both cases, man is to conform his own mind to the divine mind that orders and makes the cosmos.
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