The Grammar of the Heart — Reflection VII

Phronema: More Than Having the Right Ideas

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

— Philippians 2:5

There is a word in the Christian East that is difficult to translate.

Phronema.

We can call it mind.

Mindset.

Disposition.

Consciousness.

Way of thinking.

Spiritual perception.

None of these is wrong.

None is enough.

Perhaps the difficulty itself tells us something important.

Phronema does not describe merely what we think.

It describes the place within us from which we think, perceive, judge, desire, pray, and act.

It is not simply the collection of ideas we believe to be true.

It is the shape the heart has acquired from living within those truths.

This distinction matters enormously.

A person can hold correct theological opinions and still possess a heart largely untouched by them.

We can believe in divine providence and live in continual anxiety.

We can defend the doctrine of grace while secretly imagining that everything depends upon us.

We can speak beautifully about mercy and remain merciless toward another person.

We can affirm that every human being bears the image of God and still reduce someone to his worst action.

We can venerate the Cross and spend our lives avoiding every form of self-emptying.

We can speak about resurrection while living as though death has the final word.

Orthodoxy of thought matters.

But the Fathers want something deeper.

They want the truth to become the form of the person.

Perhaps this is why the spiritual life cannot finally be reduced to acquiring correct ideas.

Christianity certainly contains doctrines. What we believe about Christ, the Trinity, creation, the human person, salvation, the Church, and the resurrection matters profoundly.

But dogma was never intended merely to inhabit the intellect.

Dogma opens onto a world.

The question is whether we have entered it.

The doctrine of the Incarnation tells us that God has united Himself to human nature.

But eventually that truth must change how I look at the human being standing before me.

The doctrine of creation tells us that existence is gift.

Eventually that must change the way I receive the ordinary world.

The doctrine of the resurrection tells us that death has been conquered.

Eventually that must enter the room where someone I love is dying.

The doctrine of divine mercy tells us something about God.

Eventually it must determine what I believe is possible for the person I find hardest to forgive.

When doctrine becomes perception, something like phronema begins to emerge.

But even this can be misunderstood.

We may hear the word and imagine that phronema means developing an individual “Orthodox worldview”—learning enough theology, reading enough Fathers, acquiring certain opinions about modern culture, and gradually thinking like an Orthodox Christian.

There may be something useful in speaking this way, but it remains dangerously incomplete.

Phronema is not a private spiritual mentality.

It is ecclesial.

The mind being formed in us is not something we invent through private study.

It is something we receive by entering the life of a people.

This is crucial because Christianity itself is not something that happened to isolated individuals.

Christ gathers a Body.

The Scriptures are received within a people.

The Creed is confessed by a people.

The Eucharist makes visible a people gathered around Christ.

The feasts belong to a shared memory.

The fasts shape a common life.

The hymns teach a people how to see.

The saints become the memory of the Church.

Even the solitary monk disappears into the desert carrying within him the prayer, Scripture, worship, and faith of the community from which he came.

There is no purely private Christianity in the desert.

The hermit’s solitude is ecclesial.

This means that the grammar of the heart is learned somewhat as every grammar is learned.

We learn language by dwelling among those who speak it.

A child does not begin with grammatical rules.

He listens.

He imitates.

He stumbles.

He is corrected.

He hears the same sounds thousands of times.

Eventually he no longer translates.

He simply speaks.

Perhaps the Church forms us in much the same way.

We stand in worship before we understand everything that is being said.

We hear the Psalms again and again.

We confess the Creed.

We fast when the community fasts.

We feast when the community feasts.

We ask forgiveness.

We kiss an icon.

We light a candle.

We hear the lives of the saints.

We receive the Eucharist.

We bury the dead.

We return at Pascha and hear once more that Christ is risen.

Year after year.

Slowly the world begins to look different.

Time itself changes.

It is no longer merely January, March, August, December.

There is Lent.

Pascha.

Pentecost.

Dormition.

Nativity.

There are Wednesdays and Fridays.

There are vigils and feasts.

There are seasons of fasting and seasons when the table becomes abundant again.

The body begins to learn what the mind alone could never teach it.

Even hunger becomes theological.

So does food.

So do candles.

So does standing.

So does bowing.

So does singing.

So does silence.

The Church teaches the whole person.

And perhaps this is why phronema cannot simply be downloaded from books.

Books can bring us to the threshold.

They can awaken desire.

They can correct misunderstanding.

They can introduce us to voices whose vision changes our lives.

I owe more than I can say to books.

But no book can become the Body of Christ around us.

No private library can replace a people.

No amount of reading about repentance can replace asking forgiveness.

No study of the Eucharist can substitute for standing among others with empty hands.

No fascination with monastic wisdom can substitute for the difficult asceticism of actually belonging to other human beings.

And belonging is difficult.

This is important too.

It is easy to love an idealized Church.

The real Church contains people.

They sing off key.

They misunderstand us.

They disappoint us.

They possess political opinions we dislike.

They speak too much.

They fail to notice us.

They sometimes wound us.

And we do the same to them.

Yet precisely here the private spiritual world begins to break open.

The brother becomes part of our salvation.

The person beside us at prayer prevents Christianity from becoming an exquisite interior possession.

We cannot simply construct the tradition according to our preferences because someone else is already standing next to us saying:

“Lord, have mercy.”

The same words.

The same mercy.

The same Lord.

Perhaps phronema begins there.

Not in spiritual sophistication.

In communion.

This also protects us from another danger: confusing the ethos of the Church with a collection of cultural preferences.

Every Christian tradition takes flesh in cultures. That is unavoidable and often beautiful.

But phronema is deeper than taste.

It is not a preference for a certain kind of music, architecture, clothing, language, or aesthetic atmosphere.

One can love incense and remain proud.

One can know Byzantine chant and remain cruel.

One can quote the Fathers and refuse forgiveness.

One can possess every outward marker of tradition and still resist the mind of Christ.

The test lies deeper.

Does the heart become humble?

Does repentance become more honest?

Does mercy become more instinctive?

Does prayer become simpler?

Does judgment of others diminish?

Can we endure being unknown?

Can we forgive?

Can we receive correction?

Can we remain with suffering without needing to explain it away?

Can we love the person actually before us?

These questions reveal more than vocabulary.

They reveal formation.

St. Paul gives us perhaps the clearest description of Christian phronema when he writes:

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”

And what immediately follows?

Self-emptying.

Christ does not grasp.

He empties Himself.

He takes the form of a servant.

He becomes obedient.

He descends.

The Christian mind is cruciform.

That should frighten us a little.

Because it means that possessing the mind of Christ cannot finally mean becoming increasingly certain that we are correct.

It means becoming increasingly willing to descend in love.

The Fathers understood this.

Their theology emerges from this descent.

The elder who sees his own sins and does not judge his brother has learned something no theological argument can produce by itself.

The monk who receives humiliation without hatred has learned something.

The person who prays for an enemy until the enemy’s suffering becomes his own has learned something.

The caregiver who performs the same hidden act of love again and again without anyone seeing has learned something.

The heart is acquiring another grammar.

This is why phronema is inseparable from repentance.

The moment I believe I possess it, I have probably begun to lose it.

No one graduates from the mind of Christ.

There is always further to descend.

Further to forgive.

Further to surrender.

Further to love.

And because this formation is ecclesial, we need one another precisely here.

We need the saints to show us what Christianity looks like when it becomes human flesh.

We need spiritual fathers and mothers who can see what we cannot see in ourselves.

We need brothers and sisters who expose our impatience.

We need worship that continues whether or not we feel inspired.

We need fasting that reminds the body it is not sovereign.

We need confession because self-knowledge alone is unreliable.

We need the Eucharist because salvation is not an idea but communion.

We need the Church because the heart cannot teach itself a language it did not invent.

This is where The Grammar of the Heart has been leading.

The heart learns through repetition.

Through suffering.

Through repentance.

Through prayer.

Through the Fathers.

Through worship.

Through the person beside us.

Through the slow correction of our vision.

And eventually something happens that can be difficult to describe.

We no longer simply believe certain truths.

We begin to inhabit them.

Mercy becomes more believable than condemnation.

Communion becomes more fundamental than autonomy.

Repentance becomes more natural than self-justification.

Mystery becomes less threatening than certainty once seemed necessary.

Christ becomes not merely the object of our thought but the horizon of our seeing.

This is phronema.

Not having all the right answers.

Not possessing an ideology.

Not acquiring a religious personality.

Not mastering the language of the Fathers.

It is the slow formation of a human heart within the life of the Church until that heart begins, however imperfectly, to recognize reality as the saints recognized it.

And perhaps the deepest sign that this is happening is that we become less conscious of possessing anything at all.

A fluent speaker no longer thinks about grammar.

He simply speaks.

The saint does not wake each morning congratulating himself for possessing the correct spiritual worldview.

He sees God.

He sees his own sin.

He sees his brother.

And he loves.

That is the grammar we are trying to learn.

Not alone.

Never alone.

Within a people.

Within a tradition.

Within the Body.

Until the mind of Christ becomes, by grace, the mind in us.