Basil the Great on the Nous.

Nevertheless, no one would allege the heaven to be invisible because of what is unknown; it would be said to be visible on account of our limited perception of it. It is just the same in the case of God. If the nous has been injured by devils it will be guilty of idolatry, or will be perverted to some other form of impiety. But if it has yielded to the aid of the Spirit, it will have understanding of the truth, and will know God. But it will know Him, as the Apostle says, in part; and in the life to come more perfectly. For “when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.” The judgment of the nous is, therefore, good and given us for a good end — the perception of God; but it operates only so far as it can.

The Orthodox did not invent the Nous, they simply continued the thought and intellection and tradition upon the identical subject. Noetics is the science of not just “how we know what we know” (epistemology) but indeed “what does it mean to know, what are the modes of knowing, etc.”. To grasp the dimension of the Nous is to understand a great deal more about human beings than those in the grip of ideology are capable of; for instance, many “conservatives” are rabid about the “the Left”. But when you discuss the subject with them, you find that they define “the Left” as anything which is not “conservative” or “classically liberal”. And when you get them to flesh that out, it turns out that they actually do accept basic dogmas of the Left, such as the primacy and priority of individual, abstract Thought, or the absolute freedom of the will, the secular state, etc. A Noetic faculty would curtail such false starts by suggesting that each person or individual apprehends “facts”, not by dialectical and ideological ratiocination, but rather by the immediate intuition of the soul, which actually directs the direction that reason is allowed to investigate.

Another way to say it is that Nous “controls the terms of debate” not by anti-intellectualism, but by spiritual regulation, or hermetic respiration (see Tomberg). Nous is not irrational, but “beyond ratio”, if by reason we simply mean the defining of terms and the parsing of arguments. Reason works so well that a strong, true conclusion (as far as it goes) becomes mistaken (by the Nous) for the absolute truth, which “truth” the Nous then disguises from itself by appropriating for itself, forgetting (in that sense) that it simply used a tool well during an argument. Then again, it disguises it in the opposite direction by pretending that the “objectivity” and certainty of the argument springs entirely from the Ratio, when in truth, much of the religious meaning and portent derives from qualities inherent in the Nous itself, its hunger for Truth, etc. It is as if no other good arguments were or ever could be made in the world. In this way, the tangle of human convictions becomes instantiated as ideology, and clouds the mirror of the soul, which becomes progressively troubled by passion and despair, which alternate.

Lest you think this is merely an academic subject, here is one of the last of the old Europeans, Jacques Barzun, explaining the climate of North American thought in 1959:

“Never, in truth, has the educated population needed to be so often reassured about its distinguished fellow members’ (the intellectuals) being human – Did not a Harvard scholar of blameless life receive the discovery about Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter with the words, It makes him seem like one of us? The world greets with approval any discovery of a shortcoming, applauds the confession of mistakes, and indemnifies the spectator for any fleeting sense he may have of diminution by someone else’s accomplishment. A truly modern dictionary would add an entry under ‘human’ – the opposite of admirable; and religious critics who repeat that a godless world falls into the worship of man should open their eyes to the demonstration of the contrary.”

Barzun also wrote a book entirely in praise of America, but at least he could clearly see the “state of the Union”. Gornahoor has often addressed this tendency of the modern mind to assume that an opinion is better than none, even if unformed. This overlooks the deformation of mind which occurs when one self-deceives one’s own self and pretends to knowledge that is neither true nor exact. Is it too much to suggest that the West’s abandonment of the Nous in favor of dialectic represents a peculiar and necessary step within a devolution of spiritual consciousness (and therefore, of Mind) itself? If Mind were not important, it could be detached from spirituality, and treated separately. It could be isolated, and contained. It could be dissected and degraded. And so it has. Our intellectual class (under assault from Art, Science, and Philanthropy in Barzun’s thesis) will at last turn upon itself, when it is deprived of the magnificent edifice of the cathedral of the Spirit.

The abandonment of the Nous (along with the neopagan desire to purify the West of Christianity in its entirety) will at last result not in a de-sentimentalizing of thought, but an actual dessication along a different line. This is not primal purity, but Chaos. The Nous cannot be purified, except in the manner worked out in the Christian medieval tradition, indicated by paragons such as Saint Bonaventura in his Iteranarium. There is no cause for panic, simply a return to the source, a recollection of who we are called to be. This is the salvation of the West, which awaits each of us willing to come into the fullness of the apotheosis, destined for us as an act of free choice.