If You Want to Enter into Life: Therapy and Spiritual Growth (Part One)

Père Philippe Dautais

Translated from

Philippe Dautais, Si tu veux entrer dans la vie: Thérapie et croissance spirituelle. Bruyères-le-Châtel: Nouvelle Cité, 2013

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Philippe Dautais, from a very devout Catholic family, is a French Orthodox priest under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Romania. From childhood, his deeply personal bond with the invisible led him toward the desert and toward the Desert Fathers, whose teaching has nourished the Christian tradition since the first centuries of our era. Working closely with Annick de Souzenelle, he founded the Sainte-Croix Center in the Dordogne with his wife Élianthe in the early 1980s; it remains very active and vibrant today. His openness to the great wisdom traditions of humanity — especially those of the East — and his deep personal mysticism have enabled him to develop a particularly incarnate spiritual teaching, in which bodily and psychological healing plays an important role.

Francophone Orthodoxy has much to offer the English-speaking Church, not simply in richness of reflection, but in an ecclesial style that seems to evade many of our besetting cultural and religious pitfalls.

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Introduction

Man¹ is a being of relationship. Relationship sets in motion what is inscribed in each person. Without this dynamism, the immense richness we carry within us would remain inactive and therefore sterile. The other allows me to express who I am and, in return, I allow him to express who he is, to the enrichment of both. It is through the mode of relationship that each person learns to know himself and to discover the other, in what is similar and what is different.

We each bear the same humanity. Yet each one expresses this common nature in a unique way. Because we have everything in common, we can communicate; and because we are not confused with one another, we can enter into relationship. Sharing the same flesh, each person is different. We will never finish exhausting the immensity of diversity and the unfathomable depth of humanity. Something escapes us in the other and in ourselves. This mystery draws us and spurs us on. Through it, we are carried — often without realizing it — into a dynamic of life that makes us alive.

Relationship is life and life is relationship. In relationship there is the other, myself, and what is between the other and myself. This inter-relationship, this exchange of life between one and the other, allows each of us to reach more than ourselves. It makes one alive and brings out in us unsuspected qualities. We find this dynamism in the simplest elements of matter. If we combine two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, in specific proportions, the resulting element (water, H₂O) brings forth properties that were in neither the hydrogen nor the oxygen — properties that generate life.

Relationship is life and makes us alive. It is, plainly, the foundation of all therapy and the path toward true life. It is always worth emphasizing that every therapy is founded on a relationship of trust and mutual welcome. There is here a virtue proper to relationship which, in a climate of benevolence, will make it possible for speech to free itself. To speak is to bring into the open, into the light, what remained dark and was acting without our knowing it, within us and even against our will. This process, made easier by relationship, consists in seeing, recognizing, and then naming, so as no longer to be under the sway of unconscious movements. It allows access to interior freedom and to the emergence of the person through the path of dis-identification, watchfulness, and metanoia. That is what will be brought to light in this book.

In the Gospels it appears clearly that Jesus of Nazareth did not come to found a new religion. He strove to live relationship to the full with each of the disciples and with those who came to him. When a person approached him, he engaged himself fully in the relationship, fostered an attitude of trust which he regarded as the cause of healing, and from that encounter there sprang a transformation that could be expressed in a physical healing. Christ sealed this transformation with these words: “Go, your faith has saved you.” Here “faith” describes the dynamic of trust that brought the healing to the surface.

In the encounters reported by the Gospels — especially with Levi, Zacchaeus, Martha, Mary, the Samaritan woman — we see Jesus committing himself to the relationship. He brings each one back into contact with that person’s deep being and sets him again within a dynamic of spiritual growth.

This attitude sends us back to an essential question: what was the triggering element of our own search for meaning? What event or encounter set in motion our thirst for life and our aspiration to be? It is clearly acknowledged that one cannot walk the path in another’s place. In that fact, the essential thing lies in the spark that will awaken an impulse of life and a thirst for fullness. “If anyone thirsts,” says Jesus, “let him come to me and drink” (St John 7:37).

This thirst lies latent in the heart of every human being; the principal pedagogy deployed by Christ consists in awakening it. Love, as the goal, takes root in the springing forth of desire. It is said: “You shall love.” This word is not to be heard as a commandment, for one cannot love on command, but as an encouragement. It tells us that we are capable of loving, that we bear this aspiration within us, and that it remains for us to put it into practice. The Gospels show us that it is by and in relationship that the seed of love can blossom. Love is the quality of the relationship. Thus, relationship lived in this perspective is the royal road. The essential message of the Gospels is summed up in this word: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is the whole Law and the Prophets” (St Matthew 22:37–40).

The approach proposed here rests on the Gospels (which are in connection with the whole of Scripture) and draws largely on the Philokalic tradition. This tradition is rooted in the experience of the Fathers of the Egyptian desert in the 4th century, whose main current extends up to the 14th century and has come down to us through the monastic way. Philokalia means “love of beauty.”

For the ancients, beauty is a name of God. It is the expression of His unity. The Philokalia is the quest for this interior beauty, identified with “the image of God” in Man. It is the quest for what is most original in each of us, buried in the depth of the heart, like the precious pearl in its field according to the Gospel, and available as soon as one opens oneself to this dimension. The Desert Fathers affirmed that every human being can have access to this Source which springs in the innermost part of each one. Saint Augustine specified that “this Source thirsts to be drunk.” The Fathers considered that the best remedy is to discover this source and that, before all else, it is a matter of taking care of this precious pearl, of what is sound in us, in order better to bear our interior disorders. It is an invitation to return inward, to discover the immense wealth inscribed in the depth of every human being. It is from this depth that each person can draw the resources needed for healing.

By this path of return to oneself, the existential perspective changes. The world is no longer an end but a means; it is no longer the only horizon but the possibility of opening to true life.

In this opening, illnesses and trials become so many occasions of spiritual growth. In this sense, therapeutic action must not aim only at the restoration of health but must orient man toward a dynamic of fulfillment. The healing accounts in the Gospels are explicit in this regard. Conversion (metanoia) is the key word.

In the philokalic spirit, the therapeutic process does not stop at treating sufferings, unease, or wounds; its vocation is to lead the person to interior unity. It begins with a consultation, with a search for help. It continues in a relational dynamic in which the person is welcomed, listened to, taken into account in his subjectivity. A relationship of trust which will enable the person to speak his distress, to name what hurts him, oppresses him, even what destroys him, and also to say the feelings that dwell in him.

In this approach, the therapist or guide centers on the person, on the potentialities and forces of life that are being expressed, more than on the difficulties he is going through, for the essential thing is to bring the subject to the surface and to lead the person toward himself. This attitude will help the person to “stand upright,” and then to transform the crisis or the trial into an occasion of maturity and spiritual growth.

We shall see that this change passes through a process of successive “dis-identifications” which places the subject as observer and leads him to the recognition of a deep dimension that escapes the hold of worldly conditionings and assaults. It is from this dimension that the path of reconstruction can take place.

It is an awareness that the person is much more than his wounds, his sufferings, or his relational dysfunctions. An awareness that gives meaning and orients him toward a becoming in which the force of life and the upward dynamism that dwell in the depth of each being can be expressed. A true turning-about, a change of outlook in which the evil suffered becomes an initiatory possibility, in which the person gains the upper hand over what is happening in him, over the movements of nature in him. Thus he will be able to reappropriate his potentialities, his interior qualities in order to put them into practice, to reach his deep desire, and to fulfill his specific vocation. An opening to the dynamic of fulfillment which responds to the quest for meaning.

This passage is the very condition for attaining interior unity. The principle of unity in the human being is the person.² Thus the path toward interior unity and the emergence of the person, of the subject, are one and the same thing.

This path passes through the integration of one’s own history and through successive reconciliations with oneself, with one’s reality of incarnation, with God, in order to lead to reconciliation with the other. Forgiveness is here an essential key. We shall see how it is an opening toward a new life, a break with a murderous and death-dealing logic and with the infernal cycle of repetitions, how it opens the field of reconciliations even to the impossible love of enemies. Finally, it is the restoration of a state of trust.

In the vision of the Gospels (as seen above) and of the Patristic tradition, the essential element of the therapeutic approach (also called praxis) is to place the human being again within the dynamic of spiritual fulfillment. Existential wound and failure become privileged places of transformation. It is the role of the guide to make this clear in order to help the person to reappropriate his own capacities and to free himself from what keeps him from entering into true life. Jesus Christ, physician of souls and bodies, has shown us the way.

Chapter One: What Is Man?

Every accompaniment and every therapeutic approach rests on a conception of the human being. This presupposition is more stated or less, but it is always present and underlying. It is formative. The path proposed toward interior unity presupposes a unitive vision in which the psychological and the spiritual are not set in opposition, but in which the therapeutic dimension is situated within the perspective of Christian spirituality, founded on a Judeo-Christian anthropology.

The Christian view of Man is naturally inspired by the biblical account and by the Hebrew tradition. The Jews have a unitive view of the human being. They consider him as a whole: flesh (bassar) permeated by breath (nefesh), where flesh is less the body than Man in his entirety in his cosmic dimension, and nefesh represents the vitality of the flesh, that which sets it in motion. In this view, flesh is never grasped apart from breath, from vital impulse. Flesh without breath is no longer flesh but a corpse. It should be noted that the word “body” does not exist in Hebrew; one cannot therefore identify flesh with body.

The Bible also introduces the notion of “Ruah,” which designates the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God breathes grace into the creature who is, according to the book of Genesis, unfinished and therefore inscribed in a dynamic of fulfillment. The Ruah makes possible the coherence of the two constitutive parts of Man, bassar and nefesh. It energizes them and sanctifies them.

We are far here from a static view of Man as made up of juxtaposed elements. In this view, the human being is placed within a dynamism and a horizon. After the resurrection, Man’s body will be a spiritual body, a “pneumatized”³ body, whose principle of life will be the very energy of the Holy Spirit. This transfigured body will express the soul, itself illumined and deified by the divine light.

Thus Man has existence only through participation in the Ruah; this is what Saint Paul reminds the Corinthians: “Do you not know,” he says, “that you are God’s temple and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Cor 3:16). Elsewhere he will say: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit (Pneuma) who is in you?” (1 Cor 6:19).

The body is not the tomb of the soul, as Plato thought, but “the musical instrument animated by the Spirit,” according to the fine expression of Saint Gregory of Nyssa (4th century).⁴ In this perspective, to be spiritual is not to escape the body, but to open, in one’s body, to the deifying action of the Ruah, of the Spirit. The apostle Paul calls “spiritual” those “who are docile to the Spirit and are the dwelling of the Holy Spirit who is in them” (cf. 1 Cor 3:16). A Pharisee, son of a Pharisee, he teaches a Semitic anthropology, which is expressed in his letters, notably in 1 Thess 5:23: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly, and may your whole being — Spirit (Pneuma), soul, and body — be kept blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” According to St Irenaeus of Lyon (second century), the Apostle, by this statement, “clearly defined the perfect and spiritual Man,” for “the molded flesh, by itself, is not the completed Man: it is only the flesh of Man, therefore one dimension of Man. The soul by itself is not Man either: it is only the soul of Man, therefore one dimension of Man. Nor is the Spirit Man: it is given the name Spirit, not the name Man. It is the union, in communion, of these three realities that constitutes the completed Man” (Against the Heresies V, 6, 1). The perfect Man is the one who participates fully in the life of the Spirit.

By the integration of the body, by taking account of the movements of the psyche, together with a dynamic of opening of consciousness in a spiritual perspective, we recover the unitive vision that was that of the first Christians. They had a tripartite view of the human being and held that each element — body, soul, spirit — was essential for spiritual ascent. Man would not be whole if one of his components were lacking. What we call Man is an indivisible whole.

Not all the Fathers adopted this approach; nevertheless they are strangers to any dualism that would oppose intelligence and matter. They distinguish, however, in Man, two successive states: his present condition, historically marked by sin; and his eschatological condition, marked by the return of Christ, when Man and creation will be transfigured by the outpouring of the energies of the Holy Spirit.

This final condition of the universe was in the original divine plan and will at last be realized.

In the present condition, Man is subject to servitude and to the laws of biology (through the need to nourish himself, to follow natural cycles, and to reproduce sexually); he is also subject to suffering, to death, to decay.

After the resurrection, he will be totally set free and will be clothed with a spiritual body (the body and the soul will be “pneumatized”) and plunged into the divine light (1 Cor 15:35–49). Each will keep his own identity: Peter will remain Peter, Philip will remain Philip...

Man Created in the Image of God

First of all, the Fathers made the distinction between the uncreated and the created, between the Creator and the creature. They recalled the transcendent dimension of God, who is wholly Other in relation to the created cosmos and to the human being. Thus Man is not of divine nature but created in the image of God. This distinction does not introduce a dualism; it causes to coincide both otherness and kinship between Man and God. On this basis it is necessary to specify what Orthodox Christians mean by the “image of God.”

First of all, Man, created in the image of God, is the reflection of divine beauty; above all he is a marvel of God. In his deep being are inscribed the divine qualities of which love is the synthesis. It is therefore love that is original and not sin. It is freedom that is original and not alienation; it is joy that is original and not bitterness; it is health that is original and not sickness.

Man created in the image of God bears his own freedom, “The divine is that which transcends man, and the divine is mysteriously united with the human in the divine-human image. It is for this reason only that the appearance in the world of personality which is not a slave to the world is possible.”⁵ And he added: “God is a freedom realized; Man is a freedom in the course of realization, in the course of fulfillment.”⁶

The Fathers of the Church asked whether it is possible to distinguish, in Man, the divine element. St Gregory of Nyssa, Cappadocian Father of the fourth century, answers this clearly, starting from what is commonly attested in Christian experience: “It is the spirit (noûs) that makes Man the image of God. For the spirit is the freedom of Man.” Here he names a dimension inherited from Greek philosophy, namely the noûs, which renders the Hebrew notion of the heart — not in the sense of the organ, but of the deep heart which Olivier Clément called the “heart-spirit.” We find this reference to the noûs in most works on the hesychast tradition. We shall return to this fundamental notion later.

It remains to be specified that the image of God does not concern only the spirit. St Irenaeus of Lyon affirms that it is not Man who offered Christ the body in order to be incarnate, but that Man was created in the image of Christ — body, soul, spirit. Christ is the model, and it is Man who is created in the image. Man is called to become like Christ, to be in all things similar to Christ, who is the Alpha and the Omega of Man. “Christ is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). Man is a being created “in the image of God,” called to actualize this image in order to become like Christ.

From Image to Likeness

The image, the ontological foundation of the human being, by its dynamic structure calls for likeness, which is subjective, personal. The seed (having been created in the image) leads toward its blossoming: being according to the image.

The image of God is therefore the indelible mark of the deep being whose principle (logos) cannot be altered. If the image of God is actual, likeness is to be achieved. The image relates to the constitution of nature; the accomplishment of likeness depends on personal freedom and will. The image contains faculties which it must direct toward God. Likeness corresponds to an actualization of the potentialities of the image.

Verses 26 and 27 of the book of Genesis confirm the pneumatic dynamism we have sketched. In verse 26 God says: “Let us make Man in our image, capable of likeness, and let him have dominion...” Most of the Fathers of the Church distinguish between the image, which is inscribed in the human being, and the likeness, which is to be acquired through divine-human cooperation. Likeness would be the fruit of the deifying action of the Holy Spirit and of the cooperation of Man’s freedom.

Thus Man, in the biblical vision, was created in the image of God (Gen 1:27) and placed in a becoming, in a dynamic of growth to reach full maturity. St Irenaeus of Lyon (second century), and other Fathers after him, taught that Man was not created perfect but with a view to perfection, that he was not created immortal but with a view to immortality: “He was a child who still had to grow in order to attain his perfection” (Against the Heresies IV, 38, 2). Adam was a child rich in potentialities which he had to assume in order to reach the full maturity of a son of God.

If he was created in the image, he must be made according to the likeness. This word “to make,” which is not the same as the word “to create” in Hebrew, expresses the divine project, which presupposes the action of the two hands of the Father, that is, the Word and the Spirit, as well as the free participation of Man. In Genesis the two notions are clearly distinguished: on the one hand, God says: “Let us make Man in our image, capable of our likeness” (Gen 1:26); on the other hand, “God created Man in his image” (Gen 1:27). Such is the foundation and axis of all Christian anthropology of the first centuries and, thereafter, of Orthodox anthropology. Creation in the image of God places Man before God, in a relationship. Likeness gives him an orientation, a perspective of growth which presupposes cooperation, the agreement of two freedoms. This is what gives meaning to existence and makes of every human being a pilgrim toward himself, on the path from image to likeness.

St Gregory of Nyssa will affirm that there is no limit to this spiritual journey, that we shall not cease to grow “from beginnings to beginnings toward beginnings that will never end.” There will be no limit to this ascent “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3:18), said the Apostle Paul, for God is infinite and inexhaustible. The sanctification of Man is therefore the fruit of the cooperation (synergia) of Man’s freedom and divine grace.

Body, Soul, Esprit — or Pneuma

The French word esprit introduces a confusion because it translates two different Greek words: pneuma and noûs. The habit has been taken to translate noûs with a lowercase-s “spirit” to signify the spirit of Man, and Pneuma with a capital “S” to designate the Spirit of God. The introduction of the noûs comes from Platonic influence (its equivalent in Hebrew is the heart: lev). Christian spiritual experience confirmed and specified the noetic dimension of the human being and assimilated it to the deep heart, distinct from the heart as organ. We shall see later how noûs and Pneuma articulate and complete one another. But first we must specify what the noûs is.

The Noûs or Heart-Spirit

The distinction between spirit and soul proves essential in spiritual experience. Plato had perceived that, in its interiority, the soul becomes aware of its aspiration to transcendence. This interior dimension of the soul he called noûs. It seems, however, that he confused the aspiration to transcendence with Transcendence itself, thereby deducing the immortality of the soul from the “connaturality of the soul with the divine.” For Christians, the noûs is compared to a mirror in which the image of God is reflected. It is of this mirror that the Apostle Paul speaks when he says: “For now we see through a mirror, but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). The noûs is akin to an organ of vision and is called for that reason “the eye of the heart.” In the first sense it is the organ of awareness; it is the possibility, within the soul, of becoming aware of the states of soul and of naming the movements of the soul — moods, emotions, feelings, passions... It is also through it that we can have access to the contemplation of mysteries and to the vision of God: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

When we speak of the tripartite dimension of the human being — body, soul, spirit — ordinarily we are speaking of the noûs and not of the Pneuma. Also called the fine point of the soul or the higher part of the soul, the noûs is identified with the deep heart as capacity for silence, for awareness, and for determination:

• The capacity for interior silence (or hesychia) is experienced in prayer and meditation; it expresses an untroubled state of being.

• The capacity for awareness and for speech allows Man to become aware of interior movements, of states of soul, and to be able to name them.

• The capacity for freedom, which is capacity for decision and determination, allows one to enter into and then remain in an interior dynamism without letting oneself be distracted by the solicitations of the world or diverted by parasitic thoughts.

The spiritual path consists in the restoration of these original capacities so as to make them operative. This restoration lays down the double requirement of the life of prayer and of the purification of the heart-spirit. The means employed is the practical exercise commonly called “asceticism” in the spiritual tradition. The goal of asceticism is the acquisition of the primacy of the noûs over the soul (psyche) and over the flesh (sarx), that is, the reestablishment of the original ordering. The human being has the task of acquiring the authority of consciousness over natural movements, of passing from the state of submission to the passions to the application of the divine will. It is the passage from slavery to freedom, signified by the exodus of the Hebrews from the land of exile (Egypt) to the promised land.

We recall that the angelic world is purely noetic. The human being has noetic capacities which he must put to work in order to attain his stature as son (or daughter) of God and to become king of creation — which does not mean to enslave or mistreat, but to spiritualize nature, to allow it to express fully its sacramental potentialities.

In the Orthodox tradition, the noûs has a function of integration of the personality. It is the center of the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the central organ of the interior senses, the root of everything, the point of encounter between God and Man, where Man meets God face to face. It is called by the Apostle Paul the “inner man.”

The Relation of the Whole — Body, Soul, Spirit — to the Pneuma

For certain Fathers, and according to the Apostle Paul (1 Thess 5:23), the term Spirit (Pneuma) designates the gift of the Holy Spirit or the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is the very life of God. It is by grace that we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). “By grace we are penetrated and impregnated with God, we live in Him and from Him, we partake of His nature, as red-hot iron partakes of the nature of fire and, while remaining iron, becomes fire, shining like fire. By grace we are deified; by grace we are sons of God,” says St Maximus the Confessor.

Deification is a “pneumatization” or spiritualization of the whole being: of the body, of the soul, and of the noûs. Man becomes fully human, perfect — according to the expression of St Irenaeus cited above — when he is penetrated by grace in his body, his soul, and his intelligence (noûs). Grace opens his intelligence to the contemplation of mysteries and to the vision of God. By grace the human being can become a participant in the divine life: “The life of Man will be the vision of God” (St Irenaeus of Lyon).

The Ontological Unity of All Humanity

“We who constitute a single nature devour one another like serpents” (St Maximus the Confessor).

The Bible sees in Adam at once each human being and all humanity. In Adam it brings to light unity and diversity: unity of the human race and diversity of faces; coincidence of unity and diversity.

Each human being has a unique way of expressing the humanity that is common to us. Each has a mode of being that is proper to him according to unique configurations, expressed in his unique genome and manifested in his unique face. Diversity is the miracle of life. It is an essential richness.

God really created only one Man, the Adam-Humanity. What harms one human being reverberates through the whole of humanity. We are all one in Adam. We all partake of the same humanity, of the same flesh (Isa 58:7), “we are members one of another” (Eph 4:25). No human being is an island. All humanity is in organic connection, where each of us is a cell of a great body that forms a living and organic unity. By this fact we are all in solidarity and responsible for one another. What I do to the other, I do to myself.

We are invited to enter into this awareness in order finally to respect every human being and to consider him as a part of ourselves. To respect him and to consider him as a brother or sister in humanity means to take care of him instead of experiencing him as a rival or a threat. To take care of him is also to take care of his difference, of what he bears that is unique and irreplaceable.

In this unitive thought, Saint Silouan of Athos⁷ affirms: “Our brother is our own life.” He who despises his brother despises his own flesh (cf. the Gospel of John): a mystery of the ontological unity of human nature, of humanity. He who kills his brother kills himself. Everything that you do not love in the other expresses, to a certain degree, what you do not love in yourself. That is why, according to Saint Silouan of Athos, we must have only one thought and one hope: “That all may be saved.”

Adam is Created Male and Female

Moreover, according to the Bible, Adam is created male and female, masculine and feminine. In the first book of Genesis, creation is shown to be a process of differentiation. The term usually used in translations is “separation.” But today that word suggests the idea of rupture, which is why it is preferable, strictly speaking, to use the term “differentiation,” which is a principle of life. Differentiation joins distinction and connection. Two differentiated cells are distinct, and interact.

In the first chapter of Genesis, God distinguishes, in the dynamism of creation, heaven and earth, light and darkness, the waters above and the waters below, the dry from the wet, Adam from the adamah, and the masculine from the feminine. The Fathers of the Church will say: “God distinguishes without separating, in order to unite without confusing.” Distinctions call for successive unions. The vocation of every human being (man or woman) is to attain interior unity through the union of the polarities or complementary antagonisms that constitute him. He is invited to recognize the other part of himself, to espouse it, in order to reach the fullness of his being. The man–woman marriage expresses, on the existential plane, this fundamental work.

That is why the Church gives a privileged place to marriage, inasmuch as it represents the very dynamism of spiritual life and then of union with God. In the Bible, everything is marriage. At the heart of the Bible, the Song of Songs is there to remind us of this. In this sense, the distinction of the sexes, of the masculine and feminine genders, is inscribed in the fruitful distinction of polarities. The encounter with the other as complementary other is a possibility of surpassing and of fullness. In such an encounter there is more than the one and more than the other: there is the one and the other and what circulates between the one and the other; there is also what escapes us in ourselves and in the other, and which we could call the “hidden third.”⁸

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Read Part Two

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1. The author notes that he uses a capital “H” in French (“Homme”) when speaking of the human being in general, and a lowercase “h” when speaking of man in relation to woman.

2. Here the word “person” must be understood not in the usual sense, which confuses it with the individual, but in the sense of personal identity, which makes each human being a unique being, expressed in a unique face and by a unique genome. The person refers to the subject’s uniqueness.

3. From the Greek word Pneuma, the translation of the Hebrew Ruah, which means the divine Breath or the dynamism of grace.

4. See St Gregory of Nyssa, De Hominis Opifico, PG 44 col 148-149.

5. Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles / The Centenary Press, 1944), p. 45.

6. Translator’s note: I was unable to identify the source of this citation in an original work of Berdyaev’s.

7. Athonite monk, 1866–1938, singer of divine mercy. He notably wrote this edifying and hope-filled sentence: “Love does not tolerate the loss of even a single soul,” Starets Silouane, ed. Présence, p. 257. English translation in Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Tolleshunt Knights, Essex: Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1991.

8. An expression used by the scientist Basarab Nicolescu.