THE INTELLECT OF THE MIND – THE INTELLECT OF THE HEART
THE INTELLECT OF THE MIND – THE INTELLECT OF THE HEART

Summary/Abstract: The present paper looks at the ‘crisis of value and judgement’ in modernity through the lens of the (Eastern) Christian phenomenon of hesychia, as it appears in some literary works at various stages in the history of European culture. After an excursion into the Christian view of a trinitarian God and a theology of relatedness, as reflected also in the works of the twentieth century thinkers Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, we look at diverging and converging connotations of the concepts of ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, the ‘intellect’, both in ancient texts (like the Old and the New Testaments or those collected in The Philokalia), as well as in the works of a seventeenth century Czech thinker, Jan Amos Komenský, and in some of the nineteenth and twentieth century English fiction. Some more extensive passages are quoted from the contemporary Romanian writer, Vasile Andru’s fiction, as he focuses on hesychia as ‘an act of profound cogitation’ with beneficial effects on modern man’s social life, or as ‘the blue gold’, the ‘treasure’ of today’s troubled world.

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