IIC 167: Early Church Fathers and Catholic Parts Work

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: In the last episode, episode 166, we discussed the evidence for Catholic parts work in Scripture. Today we’re getting into, how far back can we find support for parts and systems thinking in the tradition of our Catholic church? What is the evidence for Catholic parts work in the early Church Fathers? That’s the question that we are exploring today with two professionals who know the most about it. Which early Church Fathers addressed the multiplicity of self? Which of the early Church Fathers wrote about systems thinking taken inside? How did the early Church Fathers describe the inner worlds of people? How did they understand the anthropological dimension? How did they understand the inmost self? Did the other Church Fathers believe we have parts? What were the other Church Fathers ideas about your relationship with yourself and how you can love yourself as the second great commandment demands? We are diving into all those questions and a whole lot more as we go back, way back in history to the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D., with my two esteemed guests, two Catholic professionals who know the most about Internal Family Systems, Catholic parts work, and the early Church Fathers. Join us on this journey of integration of harmonizing the best of secular and non-Catholic resources with the perennial truths of the Catholic faith. And why? To help you flourish in love.

[00:01:52] Dr. Peter: ​I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host and guide in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. I am so glad to be with you. I am a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, podcaster, writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts, but most of all, most of all, I am a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and see the height and depth and breadth, and the warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, your father, your spiritual father, and also Mary your mother, your primary parents, your spiritual parents. I am here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary. And throughout all of 2025, we are bringing in the insights from Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. We’re harmonizing those insights with the truths of the Catholic faith. Again, to help you live out the three great loves and the two great commandments: to love God, your neighbor and yourself.

[00:02:57] Dr. Peter: And I am bringing you the best of Catholic professionals in the field as my co-hosts, as my expert guests, to share with you their insights, their understandings, and their experience. And again, why? It’s not only to help you overcome obstacles and deficits in your human formation. It’s not just about recovery and healing, but it’s also about thriving and flourishing. I want you to thrive and flourish, fully embracing your identity as a beloved little son or daughter of God, not just with one or two parts of you, but with all of your parts, all your parts sharing in the bliss of a deep union with God. So this is episode 167 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. It releases on June 2nd, 2025, and with me, I have back in the virtual studio, Dr. Christian Amalu and Dr. Gerry Crete. Both were with us in the last episode on Scripture and Catholic parts work. So, Gerry Crete, a dear friend, colleague, licensed marriage and family therapist in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s the founder and owner of Transfiguration Counseling. He’s the co-founder with me of Souls and Hearts in 2019, and he’s the author of the book, Litanies of the Heart, published last year by Sophia Press. Gerry, it is so good to have you back on with us.

[00:04:21] Dr. Gerry: Yes, it’s always a pleasure.

[00:04:23] Dr. Peter: Gerry is one of the best-read people I know, one of the most-read professionals when it comes to the intersection of history, theology, spirituality, and anything having to do with parts work. So it is so, so good to have you with us again. And then Dr. Christian Amalu. He is our guest and he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Counseling Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he focuses on IFS, Internal Family Systems, and Catholic anthropology. That’s a Catholic understanding of the human person. And he really works to propose ways of reconciling and integrating Internal Family Systems with Catholicism. He has a special interest in working with trauma, especially complex trauma, attachment issues, relational issues, OCD and scrupulosity, group therapy, marital therapy and anxiety. This is his second time on the podcast. It is so good to have you with us, Christian. So good to have you back on here. Thank you for being here, and I hope it’s the second of many times.

[00:05:27] Dr. Christian Amalu: Absolutely. Thank you, Peter.

[00:05:29] Dr. Peter: Well, I thought we would just kind of open this up. We might address some questions here. Who are the early Church Fathers? When do we sort of recognize them as being early Church Fathers? Who are we talking about at the beginning here when we’re talking about the early Church Fathers?

[00:05:50] Dr. Christian Amalu: Don’t know if Gerry wanted to start or not, but I do have a couple of starting points there. The early Church Fathers, a helpful litmus in my mind when I think about the early Church Fathers is we’re first of all thinking very much about the first millennium of Christianity. So from Pentecost all the way up to the year 1000, generally speaking. I found a really helpful series of videos from Word on Fire where Bishop Barron actually goes through the early Church Fathers, some of his favorites. And I remember him saying something to the effect of, we generally have a cutoff point at the figure known as St. John of Damascus. That tends to be where a lot of scholars tend to say, okay, this is kind of where the late antiquity period is wrapping up and we’re moving into a more modern era of the church. And so that’s, at least in my mind, where I go as far as early Church Fathers. So starting with the apostles all the way up to John of Damascus, who I believe was sixth or seventh century. 

[00:06:48] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, I’d agree there. I would say that it’s typically what people say. I like to also make the distinction too, not my distinction, but looking at the Council of Nicaea, right? So pre-Nicaea and then post-Nicaea. So when we’re talking about early Church Fathers before the Council of Nicaea, it sort of has a different feel. There’s a lot of exploration. The issues they’re dealing with are a little bit different. Those are the first 300 years, really, of the church after the apostles. So that itself has its own character as Nicene Christianity, as Orthodox Christianity is kind of like forming. But then of course after that we have many great early Church Fathers as well. And we start to hear, we start to get more of the Western or the Latin fathers. Not that they don’t exist before Nicaea, but there’s more of them appearing after that.

[00:07:41] Dr. Peter: Now when we talked about this and I floated the idea, all three of us were like, yeah, absolutely. Let’s do this. What do the early Church Fathers have to say? And it may be kind of self-evident why we might be interested in what the early Church Fathers would say about this or about that, but what’s important about looking at the early Church Fathers, do you think, when it comes to this question of Catholic parts work, Internal Family Systems. Why are we interested in that? Because not everybody that listens to this is Catholic. Maybe they’re not that familiar with the early Church Fathers or the importance of them. So what do you think is really important about them?

[00:08:17] Dr. Gerry: Well, I definitely have some thoughts and we will see where it goes and where Christian jumps in with what I’m saying. So I hope this is a conversation to some extent. But I actually would make the point that we also need to consider Greek philosophy and some of the Greek philosophers, like especially Plato. Because what we have happening in those first few centuries of the church is a sort of an interesting coming together, if you will, of the Hebrew kind of experience, like the Jewish experience, especially the second temple Jewish experience, but also earlier. And so anyway, that whole Hebrew experience is coming into contact with Greek philosophy. And so you see these Greek writers now, right? When we think of the early Church Fathers, we tend to think that they’re Greek speakers, some Latin speakers, as opposed to people writing in Hebrew or anything. And so we’ve got an entire way of looking at the world and looking at philosophy, and it’s coming into contact with the Scriptures, the Jewish Old and New Testament essentially, and basically this Christian religion.

[00:09:28] Dr. Gerry: And so the formation of Christianity is influenced by both. And so when you look at someone like Plato, for example, and what he kind of teaches about concepts such as the good or the beauty, or even understanding God as an absolute, the absolute. And he even gets into topics like love and he would be using a word like nous, which we’ll talk about, I’m sure, later as well, and talked about before. Because I connect the inmost self with the nous, which is a Greek term. But we see like this entire new way of understanding our faith and Christianity. And you could say, was Christianity unduly influenced by Greek philosophy? I would argue that it created something somewhat new, like it took things, obviously, from Greek philosophy, but even expanded it and gave it a completely different understanding. So it’s a bit mind blowing to see what happens there.

[00:10:32] Dr. Gerry: And when you look at the early Church Fathers, from Origen to the Cappadocian fathers, there’s an explosion of thought and ideas around this. And Plato and Aristotle are, even though they’re pre-Christian, they’re almost considered like pre-Christian saints on some level by some, because they didn’t have the exposure of Revelation like the Jewish people did. But they’re grasping something of human nature and something of understanding of the divine in a, generally speaking, beautiful way. I mean, it has to be filtered and it has to be kind of repurposed, if you will. But there’s so much in there, and so you don’t really fully understand the early Church Fathers, especially the Greek ones, unless you have some understanding of Greek philosophy. I don’t know. So I said a lot there. I don’t know, Christian, how do you bounce off of that?

[00:11:26] Dr. Christian Amalu: I love it, first of all, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. And I think that there are a couple of other very well-considered dimensions that you touched on, that I go a little bit deeper with that. Because you are picking up on, I love when you said, there was really something new that was made here. I remember hearing a reflection at some point, I can’t remember where I heard this from, but that Christ coming into the world at the point that he did was so unique because it was the convergence of three very, very prominent world events that were taking place and the milieu in which the Word became flesh. The first was in light of Hebrew revelation, Hebrew faith and spirituality, the Greek culture, which included the philosophy, all within the context of the Roman Peace. And in doing that, that very much formed the very thought processes that went into the creation of the New Testament and into the thought of people at the time. And so the Greek philosophy was very much a commonplace of trying to understand people. That deeper language comes from the Greek to understand more nuanced concepts that maybe didn’t quite exist in some of the earlier languages. And again, Plato and Aristotle and all the early philosophers really drew this out, and it would’ve been present at the time of the Apostles.

[00:12:45] Dr. Christian Amalu: I think something that’s another helpful backdrop to piggyback off of what you were saying is that, yes, the Hebrew Scripture is originally being written in Hebrew and some in Aramaic. By that time, by the time of Christ, there would’ve been the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of it, but the entirety of the New Testament, to go more to your point that something new was created, the entire New Testament was written in Greek. And so the original thought is in that language, that nuanced language, which is using new terms like nous. And so this has to map on somewhere and it’s from that New Testament linguistic criteria that we start to get that explosion of different thought and people are working within that to, not just think up new ways, but to elucidate a deeper understanding of what we know from the Old Testament, harmonizing it with the New.

[00:13:36] Dr. Christian Amalu: So because that is the framework by which the early Church Fathers, especially up to the Council of Nicaea, are almost predominantly thinking in, is within that Greek philosophical framework, it makes sense that we give attention to that because there’s a line of continuity then. I think that’s something that came to mind for me thinking about the early Church Fathers and parts work, is there’s a connection from there and it leads through the centuries to us now. There’s not only something beautiful in finding that continuity, but it also shows that it’s not just something new that’s cropping up right now, but this is a point of connection with the universal church.

[00:14:18] Dr. Peter: It’s beautiful. And I like how you’re bringing in the idea of philosophy, right? Because so much of what we’re talking about when we’re discussing parts work is actually metaphysics. It’s actually not so much theology. It’s philosophy and it’s like, what is the nature of man? How do we understand human beings? And so that’s not just exclusively the purview of Scripture or theology or understanding the spiritual dimensions of this. It’s also in the natural world. And one of the beautiful things about the early Church Fathers is that they did bring these two together. They did bring these two different domains together.

[00:15:06] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, I mean I think it’s interesting to, and I know we’re not supposed to talk about St. Maximus.

[00:15:14] Dr. Peter: Well, we’re gonna have a whole episode on St. Maximus.

[00:15:16] Dr. Gerry: So I’m not talking about him except to say it points to some of what he built out is already present as early as Plato, as early as some of the very early Church Fathers, in this notion of the human person being a microcosm of the cosmos, if you will. And the cosmos is created by, and some level reflects, the logos. So this connection between our interior world, our mind, our subconscious, our intellect, our heart, also, and this interiority, is connected to the universe. And that the universe is created by God, right? And so they’re making these, like you used the word metaphysics, like they’re making these metaphysical claims. And they’re grappling with this notion that Christ, in his incarnation, is more than the Messiah of the Jewish people who came to deliver the people out of slavery. Of course that’s a big part of it, but it’s bigger than that. There’s a metaphysical change in the universe when God himself enters into the universe, into the material world, in Christ.

[00:16:44] Dr. Gerry: And so these early Church Fathers are grasping the truth from the Hebrew Scriptures of Christ in his life and everything. And they’re looking at the Greek philosophy and their understanding of the universe and everything and our relationship to it. And they’re seeing, their lights are going on. There’s giant light bulbs going on for them. Like Christ’s significance as this center point in the history of the world, like Christian was talking about, like the convergence in history. That’s really amazing that it should happen then. But that there’s cosmic convergence, right? And that amazing thing in the universe, that’s happened because of the incarnation, is happening inside of us. So there’s like this wild connection, of what it means to look inside oneself to discover God. And that’s so personal in a way, but it’s happening to hopefully like all the people, all the Christians, to become the body of Christ. But it’s also like, it’s so interior and personal and imminent, but it’s also like wildly transcendent. So you’ve got this mind blowing realizations. And when you read the early Church Fathers, I think you can grasp like how they are just like impacted by this truth, right, that we don’t even. I’m excited about it because I think it’s so cool and I think that a lot of Christians, they don’t think about it that way. Like they don’t realize what’s really going on.

[00:18:19] Dr. Peter: So they are the ones grappling with the implications of what the incarnation meant. And they’re grappling with this question, I guess, in a word that came to mind, of identity. Like, who are we now? Who are we now that Christ has come into the world? Who are we now that we’ve been redeemed? Who are we now that we have been invited into the mystical body of Christ? And so kind of opening up these questions and then what does it mean for who we are inside and how can we understand ourselves in this grand history of thought, this tradition, bringing the best of that into the light of this new revelation. And then how do we make sense of that in the way that we live our lives, in the way that we love, really? And so that’s what’s really exciting to me. These were the ones that were really grappling with that in a way that can be passed down through their writings and so forth that we can read, that we can study, that we can come into contact with centuries later.

[00:19:23] Dr. Christian Amalu: Yeah. I would say to continue along that thought, everything that Gerry was saying, a word kept coming to mind. And this is a really big word, especially in the Catholic world right now, and it’s such a big word that it’s part of the name of this podcast. These were the original integrationists. They were the original ones trying to do the work of integration by bringing that philosophy and faith together, grappling with, okay, we have this new information that still seems, even though it’s outside of Revelation, to be touching on the Logos, the implicit knowledge and truth of the universe, and acknowledging that God did not just write the Scriptures and the Revelation passed on to us, but he also wrote the laws of nature. And so they’re actually, finally, as you’re saying, grappling with these things, but then trying to make sense out of it, trying to present a comprehensive idea in a way that we’ve picked up that project again here in the 21st century and have been doing that for a while. I feel like we’re standing on the shoulders of the early Church Fathers. They were the first ones to start doing this, and there’s a lot of value in, first of all, not trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch, but realizing that there are some other wheels that maybe have some insight and can draw us closer to this project of integration.

[00:20:42] Dr. Gerry: I love that and I think, to kind of make some connections too, like integration and our understanding of the inmost self, like an IFS term of self. We’ve spent some time looking at, in previous podcasts, I think it was 158 and looked at inmost self and what that is. And I think that it makes greater sense when we understand what those early Church Fathers were grappling with, because it can get tedious. If you read some of their stuff, it can be tedious. Or you can look at what were they arguing about, Nicaea, like they’re making these fine distinctions between Christ, his humanity and his divinity. You know, you can wonder about that or what was Arianism? Just trying to say, but why was it so important that Arianism was wrong? Because the implications for the world, like for the integration of Christ himself as man and divinity and the implications that has for us in our innermost self and our inner world, if you will and the way that we can connect with God is like key.

[00:21:47] Dr. Gerry: And I think people don’t always make those connections because it can just sound like philosophical and difficult to make sense of, homo ousios and all these different terms they’re using, right? But when you get into it and you look at it and what is actually being implied and what does it mean that our inmost self, like that we are created in the image of God? The inmost self best represents the fact that we’re created in the image of God. Which the early Church Fathers really do talk about quite a bit and look at what that means and I’ve talked about it in Kingdom Within articles too, like about what does it mean when some of the early Church Fathers talk about the mirror of the soul? And what does it mean that we reflect the divinity? Like they’re really bringing out the beauty of the human person in his image, and they do it in a way that I don’t know that anyone else has done quite comparably. Which is so interesting.

[00:22:39] Dr. Gerry: I mean, there is a place for us to humble ourselves, right? And there’s later medieval writers who tend to like really get into what we might consider in the modern mind, very much still a lot of self-deprecation. And I’ve even wrestled that with that a little bit. But to read the early Church Fathers, I mean, this whole concept of divinization, which we’ve talked about in, I think, in previous things and in different articles. And to understand it properly, it doesn’t mean we become God in essence. But man, they really kind of look at that concept and so their goals are high. You know, these are not like teddy bear Christians. These are like hardcore, they’re shooting for the top, these saints. I mean, just my thoughts. 

[00:23:27] Dr. Peter: Let’s get into what they’re saying then. I’m just really curious if you can give us a sampling, because this has been an interest for both of you. What are some of the early Church Fathers saying about the nature of the human person, especially when it comes to this idea of multiplicity and unity kind of together, when it comes to systems thinking, when it comes to parts, you know, all the things that we’ve been talking about in this deep dive in 2025 into IFS parts work from a Catholic perspective, grounded in the Catholic understanding.

[00:24:07] Dr. Gerry: You wanna take it away, Christian?

[00:24:09] Dr. Christian Amalu: Sure, sure. We gotta start somewhere. I like to do things in chronological order and so when I did the work for my dissertation and other projects, I started, of course, with the Scriptures and with the apostles, and then worked my way into the Apostolic Fathers, which is considered that next generation, probably the first proper generation we would call the early Church Fathers. And the first one I came across was Saint Ignatius of Antioch. He was a disciple of St. John the Evangelist, and was the bishop of Antioch. He’s commonly called the Doctor of Unity. And he said in one of his letters that unity is the first and foremost prerogative of God. And so understanding him from a Trinitarian perspective, but still that unity kind of talk, it hints at that multiplicity, but still being one, which we’ll find that theme throughout the Church Fathers. But you kind of see that first explicitly with St. Ignatius. The thing that really caught my attention was that he said to love one another with an undivided heart. That was a little bit of the spoiler I gave in the last episode. And so hearing that this idea of loving with your whole being, not being divided, not holding back from the different ways in which you can love, but to love from a wholeness, essentially. It not only implies that there can be division, that you can be pulled away, you can give pieces of yourself, but you can hold back. Multiple different examples in the Scriptures of that happening. But that that is something that we are called to this kind of perfect love that comes from a wholeness. And this is happening, first generation of Christianity past the apostles. And so, just a brilliant statement that I think kind of lays the bedrock for this idea of division, multiplicity, but working toward unity as kind of core at the project of being a Christian and working our way toward Christ.

[00:26:08] Dr. Gerry: I love it. That’s a great quote, Saint Ignatius. I’ll point out, I can’t remember where he is in relation to St. Ignatius exactly, but I think it’s still apostolic, with St. Irenaeus.

[00:26:21] Dr. Christian Amalu: Next generation, yeah.

[00:26:23] Dr. Gerry: Okay, I can’t remember the exact.

[00:26:25] Dr. Christian Amalu: Yeah. Irenaeus famously said, “I was taught by Polycarp, who was taught by John.”

[00:26:31] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, so that’s pretty early. So he can’t be that much later than Ignatius. Anyhow, so the two things, in his Against Heresies, right? It’s a very famous writing where he’s arguing against all these different heresies that are all over. And he said, “God became man, that that man might become God.” Like that was one of the things that he says. So again, he’s speaking to this idea of divinization and speaking about the possibility that man can be transformed, that we can be transformed. And then his other super famous quote. A little later, but in Against Heresies is, “The glory of God is a living man and the life of a man is the vision of God.” And I believe, because I’ve looked at the context of that quote, and he is kind of speaking about Christ, ultimately, in this, but he’s also speaking about, on some level, for us. And so what does it mean? Sometimes it’s, quoted as “a man alive,” but I think a better translation is the glory of God is a living man.

[00:27:26] Dr. Gerry: So what does it mean to be a living man? And it means almost like a whole man, the fullness of being a man, and Christ is the fullness of being man. And so we are called toward that. And the vision, you know, of man is the vision of God. So Christ is the vision of God within us. And so, again, I’m not so much talking about parts there or anything, but it still speaks powerfully in my mind to the inmost self and who we’re called to be. And then when you connect that, and now I’m jumping around history, I’m sorry, but like with, well, with Evagrius or Saint Anthony or some of the saints and certainly the desert fathers, like you’ve got all these men who go out into the desert or go into some sort of monastic communities, in order to like attain that. So they want to go out and attain this sort of perfection, right? And so they’re doing ascetical practices, fasting and living in the desert and so on to attain that. But what happens, and Saint Anthony, I think is a great example, is like what happens when they do that is they have to wrestle with themselves, right? And however you want to interpret the different sort of characters that St. Anthony encounters, like, I think he sees them as demons, but they’re like representing the different struggles, whether it’s with lust or with ambitions or whatever. But he’s struggling with these different parts of himself, perhaps.

[00:28:56] Dr. Gerry: I mean, they may be influenced by temptations from demons. Got that. But he’s struggling and he has to work through them. And out in the desert, which can kind of represent the unconscious mind on some level. Or in the cell of the monastic. Like he’s in his interior space, is a working, is a wrestling is a grappling with oneself. And the complexity of that is pretty profound in the early monastics. Although they’re not gonna talk about parts in the way that we do in IFS or something, like, they’re never gonna talk in psychological language that clearly, or rarely they do. But it speaks to this inner grappling and inner working through that they have to deal with. That it’s not a simple, like, oh, all of a sudden I’ve decided to be a Christian and now I’m perfect or something. No, there’s all this interior work that has to happen in order to get to a place of wholeness and get to a place of sanctity and so on, and ultimately seek God.

[00:29:57] Dr. Christian Amalu: Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. I’m not sure I have a whole lot to add to that. When we get into the monastic tradition and stuff, I’ll have a little something to add on that later, because you mentioned Evagrius, but.

[00:30:08] Dr. Gerry: I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about him, by the way. I mean, for people who don’t know, like, I mean, he was the one who inspired, ultimately Gregory the Great, right? On the deadly sin, you know, the vices and the virtues, right? So, I mean, he really wrestles with all the different passions, right?

[00:30:27] Dr. Christian Amalu: Oh yeah. When you have the aesthetic monastic tradition and like spiritual warfare and the nuances of growing in the spiritual tradition, I really can’t think of two people more impactful than St. Anthony the Great and Evagrius of Pontus. But there’s so much of what you said right there about doing that inner work, and you talked about like going into the cell or going into the desert. This dimension of, if you’re going to work on yourself, that removing yourself from the pressures of the world, moving from the things from without, and not focusing on those outer things, but working on you. To go back to that idea from Maximus with, we’re just always gonna reference him, I’m afraid. Working on the microcosm, the world, the cosmos that you carry around first before you are then able to work on the peace in the world. That the peace kind of starts with you and then works its way out into the world, that that’s the more proper order to be operating from. And so just so glad that you looked to the monastic aesthetic tradition because I think there’s always going to be a dimension of that in this kind of work. And there’s something about that that parts work kind of models; the going within, and in the assistance of working from without, but we start within.

[00:31:42] Dr. Peter: Well, and that reflects, you know, the admonition, the command from our Lord. Remove the beam from your own eye, so that you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. You know that there’s this building on, you know, the Gospel with that.

[00:31:56] Dr. Gerry: Well, in a way, like even the concept of apatheia, you know, so we’re meant to be detached, on some level. Like all these early Desert Fathers and various ascetics talk about this apatheia, like we want to be detached from our passions, is what I think that word means. But what this detachment is about isn’t just like indifference, like I don’t care, or like we’re supposed to become like Mr. Spock or something with no emotions whatsoever. At least that’s not the way I see it. I think that detachment is very much like an unblending. So we could look at how IFS unblending is very much like a detachment and apatheia kind of thing where we have freedom from our passions. We have freedom from unblending from our parts in order to bring virtue, right? Because that’s the whole thing is like you get detachment from your passions, if they’re disordered passions, in order to bring virtue to them. So it’s very much like you’re unblending from a part in order to then work with that part and help release burdens of whatever I’m clinging to, whether it’s food or sex or, you know, ambition of some kind, whatever the vice is, right?

[00:33:19] Dr. Gerry: But we need to get detached from that in order to then fully become who we’re called to be and our parts will be more renewed, right? And have new roles like in IFS and so on, and that there’ll be this greater inner harmony, right? And so if you think of our parts as holding virtues, and developing virtues, then if they’re in an inner harmony working together, I mean, that’s very much like unity of the virtues, right? Which is a concept that emerges, right? And the idea that this inner harmony is like a unity of our virtues in which there’s just this sort of a beauty in that. So anyway, probably jumping around a little bit there. Okay, Christian, I really want to hear about what you have to say.

[00:34:03] Dr. Peter: Is there anything holding us back from Evagrius? Is there anything, any scruples you have, Christian, that we should address first? Anything like that?

[00:34:10] Dr. Christian Amalu: No, no scruples on my end. Yeah. Do you want me to dive into it? Alright, I am going to dive, yeah. Submarine’s going down. So I came across this and yes, I’ve come to really appreciate the ancient monastic tradition and just the brilliance of what I really consider to be, I think these figures were probably the original great psychologists at this point. The insight that they had into the human heart and moving toward holiness through both supernatural, but especially through practical means as well. It’s just amazing and we find a lot of this work in Evagrius of Pontus. He’s a fourth century writer. He was a contemporary of the Cappadocian fathers, so St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of Nyssa. As a matter of fact, in researching this, I found that it was St. Gregory of Nyssa. He and Evagrius were very close, and it looks like he actually ordained Evagrius a deacon. So they knew each other very well before Evagrius entered into the desert for his aesthetical practices.

[00:35:09] Dr. Christian Amalu: And yes, what Gerry said about Gregory the Great being influenced by Evagrius. Absolutely. There are numerous saints, including Maximus the Confessor and John Cassian who pull a lot from Evagrius’ spirituality. And he did come up with the eight evil thoughts, which eventually in the west turned into the seven deadly sins. And so that’s where we find that origin point. So in looking at this, I haven’t found the original source. I just got a couple of very major works on Evagrius and I’m reading my way through them and doing word searches and all the stuff right now. But I have found this from two priests. One of them is Father Thomas Hopko. A blessed memory. He passed away in 2015.

[00:35:49] Dr. Christian Amalu: He had an interview where he started talking about Evagrius, and this is what he says. The person asked him a question about forgiveness and if self forgiveness is something that is proper in the Christian context. His answer was this: “Forgiving oneself means accepting forgiveness from God and from other people. Evagrius of Pontus said that there are in us many selves, but at the base there are two. The real self, which he calls the Christ self, and the other self is a legion of other selves, which Evagrius calls the Adamic selves.” Adam, the selves that are like Adam. “He then says, what happens when we hear the word of grace is that we are split down the middle. We don’t want grace because of the pain we have to face, the fears, and so on. But one of the things that happens, one of the lies of the devil, so to speak, is the conviction that we are not worth it. It isn’t for us. We are too bad, worthless. Then there comes a point, as Evagrius said, when the Christ self needs to be convinced that yes, I exist and I am acceptable, and so that Christ self then turns to have pity and mercy on those other selves.”

[00:37:10] Dr. Christian Amalu: This is taken a little bit further by Father Antony Hughes. He is an Orthodox priest in Massachusetts. This is from one of his sermons. He was influenced by Father Thomas Hopko and takes this to another extent. He says, of course, talks about the Christ self being the original and defining self according to Evagrius, which he equates as the image of God. So the Christ self, he says, is the image of God. He then talks about the legions of the other selves. He says, “These other selves, according to Evagrius’ thought, are represented in us by the myriad of thoughts, feelings, passions, and emotions that we experience moment by moment. We are fragmented, it seems, into many parts.” He says, at some point Evagrius continues saying, by the grace of God working in us through holy baptism, the Christ self awakens to its own beauty and worth, and turns its compassionate gaze upon the legion of other selves within us. Reconciliation begins to flow. Fragmentation is overcome, and the inner world is united in love. The whole of life, eternal and internal, is swallowed up in love. He continues, and we’re almost at the end, he says, “So it is not the Christ self that must be denied, but the legion of other selves. And here denial does not mean rejection, but transformation. The Christ self, brimming with the energy of God, becomes the primary leader, the director of the symphony of the internal landscape. The whole inner world awakens to the presence and power of the grace of God and begins to adopt the way of the cross, the way of love, self-sacrifice, and humility as its natural way of thinking and living.” 

[00:39:04] Dr. Christian Amalu: I can’t think, I have not read anything as close to IFS as this. I mean, even down to the description here, the Christ self brimming with the energy of God. Self-energy? I mean there’s so much here. I feel like I could talk about this for the rest of the time and I really want to resist the urge to do that. But even talking about the Christ self as the original and defining self, the image of God, that was the direction I went in my dissertation. That the self must be the image and likeness of God. And it seems that, well, I’m glad I’m not the original one to think about that, but apparently this idea of the Christ self, that that is the self that within us exists, and that when that awakens within us, becomes operable, that it is from that point we turn toward the legion of other selves. The legion of other selves, that has to be the parts, at least in my mind that is. And that it’s not about denying them, about transforming them. He says, turning to them in the compassionate gaze. That’s what we do. And even the word, it’s one of the eight Cs. This is just a phenomenal find, at least on my end. And I think it really gives us a wonderful anchor point. This is fourth century. This is 300. This is like hovering around the time of the Council of Nicaea that, that you spoke about, Gerry. 

[00:40:33] Dr. Gerry: So is that Father Antony Hughes quoting Evagrius? 

[00:40:39] Dr. Christian Amalu: He prefaced the sermon saying that he learned this from Father Thomas Hopko. And so Father Thomas Hopko, the first thing that I quoted was in an interview. This is where, again, I haven’t dug into the sources. 

[00:40:53] Dr. Gerry: But those words, because what you did say was amazingly profound, beautiful, and very IFS, like, I can’t even imagine anything more explicit. But I wanted to know whether those were the purported words of Evagrius or the evaluation or interpretation of Evagrius’ thought by either Father Antony or Father Thomas.

[00:41:17] Dr. Christian Amalu: Father Antony, I get the sense is doing both, he’s both quoting Evagrius directly. He says, Evagrius calling the Christ self and the legion of the other selves, and that Evagrius says that the Christ self is not to be denied, but the legion of other selves and how to turn to them with the compassionate gaze. He seems to be attributing that to Evagrius. But some of the words around like, the whole inner world awakens to the presence and power of love, like some of this I think is his synthesis of what’s going on. I also found a couple of references to Father Thomas Hopko that he was brilliant and had a lot of connection points and things that he knew from the Fathers, but was notoriously bad at citing where he got it from. And so that’s why I’ve taken it upon myself to pull as much from Evagrius’ original thought as I can. I have found that there are a couple of things that have still not been translated, and I do not speak Greek, so that’s going to be a bit hard. But I am trying to track this down and even if this is still more along the lines of a distillation of Evagrius’ thought, the fact that, if this is a legitimate distillation, this is incredibly profound as far as a connection point of IFS. And the fact that this is not actually a new idea, but dare I say, an ancient Christian idea.

[00:42:40] Dr. Gerry: That flows from their understanding of Evagrius and their understanding of their faith. And if Father Antony, you know, you said is an Orthodox priest, if he’s somewhat scholarly, they’re very tied to you know, the patristics, which is what we’re talking about. I mean, so to be in the mindset of the fathers is always their goal. So fascinating. Fascinating.

[00:43:04] Dr. Christian Amalu: I can see you’re excited there.

[00:43:06] Dr. Gerry: Oh yeah. Yes. We can nerd out on that all day. Now I want to find it. I’ll help you find it if I can.

[00:43:11] Dr. Christian Amalu: Thank you. I also have to credit my wife Micole. I don’t know how she does it, but it’s an incredible ability. She has to look up things virtually and find them within seconds. I don’t know how she does it, but she was instrumental in helping me track some of this down. So Thanks, honey. But yeah, it’s just so beautiful and I read it over and over again and it’s just amazing that secularly Richard Schwartz stumbled upon this notion. It really pushes this idea to me that he kind of stumbled into natural religion of some kind, a natural discovery of a very ancient and theological disposition of the human person.

[00:43:53] Dr. Gerry: I like that, referring to them as, you know, the early or first psychologists. I think that really they’re, even the word psychology, if you break it down, etymologically, like it really means study of the soul, on some level. And just like philosophy is the love of wisdom. So these things should be very compatible, in terms of studying the soul and really understanding the soul and understanding the intricacies of that. So this whole legion of selves and this Christ self. I like that language actually. I’ve never used like Christ self, like when I talk about the inmost self. But it really is beautiful to think about it as Christ. Because that’s essentially what we are called to be is another Christ. And we are being transformed in Christ, of course, and all those things. And that it’s so linked to him.

[00:44:40] Dr. Christian Amalu: I mean, that’s goes back to St. Paul. “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This seems like the natural end of that. 

[00:44:49] Dr. Peter: But it brings in, in a sense, and I’m using the word loosely, the redemption of the parts, the redemption of the legion of other selves and that they’re included and that they’re needed, that’s not just disposable, they’re not just supposed to be amputated and discarded, but rather to be transformed as you read in that quote and included in the fullness of the person and to be included in that person’s love for God, for neighbor, for self.

[00:45:21] Dr. Gerry: You know, one thing maybe to bring up, related to the early Church Fathers, is that so many of them, especially, you know, more in the Alexandrian tradition, use allegory and typology in so much of the way that they write. By that they’re often like reading Scriptures for deeper meanings. I mean, they might acknowledge the literal sense, but they see in Scriptures deeper metaphysical, if you will, or spiritual meanings that go deeper. And that got kind of poo-pooed quite a bit, you know, definitely in the Protestant Reformation by the Protestants, but also to some extent in the later period of, well, I don’t know if I’d say that about the scholastics, but like the sort of modern period for sure.

[00:46:05] Dr. Gerry: What I’m finding is that when you’re dealing with the unconscious mind, if you’re dealing with the heart, when you’re dealing with the spiritual senses, you’re dealing with an inner world that is deeply allegorical in a lot of ways. And I know this just clinically, like when a client gives me a metaphor of some kind, like if they were to say something like, inside I feel like a fish wriggling at the bottom of a pale or something like that, or something, you know, gasping for air, to be back in the water. Like I run with those metaphors because they’re deeply profound. It deeply expresses the truth that regular just language, regular logical type language, literal stuff, wouldn’t quite capture. But that image really does capture it. And when we’re in that, whatever you want to call it, right-brain, you know, when we’re in that, it’s non-linear and it’s deeply, you know, dreams and it, but it’s emotions and there’s so much richness in our mind, and it’s not all logical linear.

[00:47:09] Dr. Gerry: And so are the Scriptures, right? And some of it’s very historical and everything, but some of it is also like the parables and stuff. It’s deeply richly allegorical. And they’re using typology, they’re using images to get to a truth that goes very deep, right? And so I think in the work we do, certainly in IFS type work with people, you are exploring our parts in this deep world within that, in so many ways, is metaphorical or allegorical or dreamlike, if you will. And there’s a powerful profound insight, but also like work that can be done within that frame. And I think that our logical western brains sometimes have devalued that. And instead, I think we’re learning from many of the early Church Fathers, well, that’s where the deep riches are.

[00:48:05] Dr. Christian Amalu: I am so tempted to nerd out and go so many directions because there’s so much that you said, Gerry, that really speaks to my heart. And I’ve seen that over and over again with my clients as well. When they speak to something that, obviously there’s not a physical fish wriggling around inside of your client. Of course not. But you said a lot about the Western idea, and I think it really comes down to, we’ve really emphasized the rationalistic, the materialistic, the empirical in the west. So much so that I think there is a tendency to lose that. And when you look at the early Church Fathers, you’re not seeing a whole lot of that disconnect of these different specializations between the material and the spiritual. They seem to have a more holistic, integrated vision that all of this is happening at the same time.

[00:48:57] Dr. Christian Amalu: And there is a value that can be lost by losing that imagery. One of my favorite stories is actually part of the conversion of CS Lewis. My favorite writer, JRR Tolkien, was instrumental in his conversion story and really found a convincing argument by telling him about what he called the true myth. The idea that myth, nowadays we use it to mean something that’s not true, but myth had a richer meaning. Stories were passed on for a reason because they spoke something fundamental and the ancient world functioned more in that way. 

[00:49:29] Dr. Christian Amalu: And so that allegorical reading that you’re talking about from the Scriptures, if we went back with a video camera, would we see exactly what they’re talking about? Probably not, not in the material way we would’ve liked, but is it still happening nonetheless? Is the microcosm of Maximus actually true? Well, multiple dimensions of why that’s true. But this integrated way of seeing that includes the allegorical and the deeply symbolic, when we look at, again, symbol is another word that we use to mean something that represents another but not really there. And that’s not really what those things mean. We’re digging into a more ancient understanding where reality is grander and more real than just the material in front of you. And we see that over and over in the early Church Fathers.

[00:50:21] Dr. Peter: And it includes a sense of awe and wonder, if we’re not reducing it to the material, the physical, the rational, the empirical, the observable, the measurable. 

[00:50:31] Dr. Gerry: It can kind of take us to, in my mind, why I love icons, you know, Eastern icons. And I know Peter’s laughing because he’s not like a major icon fan. I knew that. 

[00:50:44] Dr. Christian Amalu: That’s okay, Gerry I’m a major icon fan too, so you and I can nerd out.

[00:50:48] Dr. Gerry: It’s one of the reasons I love you.

[00:50:53] Dr. Christian Amalu: I’m touched. 

[00:50:54] Dr. Gerry: I just ordered an icon of Christ the Bridegroom.

[00:50:58] Dr. Christian Amalu: Oh, I’m jealous.

[00:50:59] Dr. Gerry: With actual gold leaf, I sort of splurged a little. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t wait for it to arrive.

[00:51:05] Dr. Christian Amalu: You owe me a viewing.

[00:51:07] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, sure, sure. And because I have a slight icon addiction, but I haven’t bought a new icon in quite a while, so I feel like I’ve been good. But what is so beautiful about icons is that they aren’t realistic. And I have found now a lot of religious art that’s kind of trying to be realistic, just sort of turns me off or just comes off sentimental or something to me. But icons never do to me. They’re deeply symbolic. They’re deeply representative. They’re using a lot of typology and so on in the way they express things. And they describe icons as a window into heaven. So you’re kind of looking at heaven. But of course, heaven’s indescribable ultimately, I’m sure. So it’s capturing a deeper meaning. Not a literal heaven, but a deeper meaning, whatever that icon might be. So one of my favorites is mother and child, and everyone knows that one. But the lips, to see that the lips of Christ and his mother almost making one face, that’s their level of intimacy, right? That picture to me is so beautiful and it says so much more about the relationship between Christ and his mother than any other picture that anybody could do, at least for me.

[00:52:25] Dr. Gerry: And I think that’s what icons do, is it transcends, it moves our mind. It takes us to a different place, a place of depth and richness that words can’t express. Ultimately, when we get into the early Church Fathers and they talk about quite a bit, the Greek ones, about God’s ineffability, like Dionysus speaks about even in the divine names. And he’s using names, but he’s ultimately saying there are no names that come close describing God. There’s no words that we possess that could ever come close. We’re doing our best here, but it’s all it is.

[00:53:07] Dr. Gerry: And when we get to those higher levels of contemplation, and hopefully, I don’t know how often you get to them, but I don’t get to a lot of crazy infused contemplation every day. But like, there are no more words, we’re completely taken outside of ourselves. And so this idea of connecting with God on this level where there are no more words. And these early Church Fathers often talk about that as a bright darkness, which seems like an oxymoron, but it’s like entering into a cloud, the cloud of unknowing, but entering into this unknown, this cloud, where it’s like our senses no longer even matter. So we’re no longer doing any kind of imaginal prayer whatsoever. We’re just simply lifted up into the presence of God, which is kind of a mind blowing experience. And so they’re speaking to that and using the language as best as they can. Anyway, so we get into understanding deep levels of contemplation, which I think, you know, these early Church Fathers really speak to in their writings. And even Plato, like I’m not saying I’m a Neo-Platonist per se, but he kind of speaks to contemplation in a way that’s very similar to these Christian authors at times.

[00:54:21] Dr. Christian Amalu: I’m definitely not like Teresa of Avila being pierced by the arrow of ecstasy. I haven’t had any experiences like that. But God willing, he draws me in closer. But yeah, beautiful stuff. I will now restrain myself from going further because it’s just.

[00:54:36] Dr. Gerry: Why are you restraining yourself? Go for it.

[00:54:38] Dr. Christian Amalu: Oh, no, I would love to nerd out with you about icons and about the apathetic theology and all of that.

[00:54:43] Dr. Peter: Well, it’s possible we might get into that in a future podcast episode.

[00:54:47] Dr. Christian Amalu: That’s more why I’m restraining myself.

[00:54:49] Dr. Gerry: We should zoom back into the early Church Fathers.

[00:54:51] Dr. Peter: Well, I’m wondering if there’s anything else that we might want to address. We’d love to do an experiential exercise when we can. But before we go there, I’m just curious if there’s anything else, you know, that seems major or any other quotes or ideas or positions from any of the other Church Fathers before we make that transition.

[00:55:11] Dr. Christian Amalu: I mean, we’re not going to Maximus, so I would skip past my Maximus quotes. There are two fathers that would be nice to quote. I don’t know if Gerry has any. But I have a quote from St. Cyril of Alexandria and a couple things from St. Augustine, which I think are really helpful and that really just stood out.

[00:55:31] Dr. Gerry: You know, we should put Augustine in the camp with Maximus and just say, we need to do an episode on Augustine.

[00:55:37] Dr. Christian Amalu: Hmm. Game changer. Yeah. Hmm. I mean, him and Maximus.

[00:55:44] Dr. Gerry: Just saying. So you can mention him, you’re free to talk about Augustine of course.

[00:55:48] Dr. Peter: If we have the content.

[00:55:49] Dr. Gerry: Ooh, Christian and I could spend the day on Augustine. I’m sure. There’s so much there.

[00:55:55] Dr. Peter: All right. We can do it. If you guys want to do it, I’ll make the executive decision that we can do it and we’ll figure out when. So, to remember, for those of you that are watching, listening, this isn’t the entirety of the early Church Fathers. We’re going to skip over St. Augustine. We’ll have something from St. Cyril of Alexandria, and I am not an expert on the early Church Fathers. But when I’ve read some of these quotes from St. Maximus, from St. Augustine, like, whoa. You know, really powerful stuff. And that’s kind of what we would expect to find because, these truths should converge. We should be able to find converging lines of evidence from different sources that allow us to sort of triangulate this and kind of wrap our minds around what’s actually true because the stakes are high. They didn’t just idly speculate about this because of some sort of just mere intellectual curiosity. It was about the highest stakes possible. It was about divinization or deification, like you were talking about, Gerry. It was about, how do we overcome natural level obstacles in addition to the spiritual obstacles? It wasn’t just about vices, it wasn’t just about eliminating sin, it wasn’t just about purification. It was about, how do we order ourselves inwardly so that we are in alignment with who we’re called to be? So yeah, this was something that I don’t know that we always take so seriously in the modern era. Like somehow we don’t think the stakes are so high. We don’t understand the glory to which we’re called, I think, in the same way that many of these early Church Fathers did.

[00:57:28] Dr. Christian Amalu: All right. If we’re going to skip past Augustine, I want to throw at least one more quote in there.

[00:57:33] Dr. Gerry: You have St. Cyril, go for it.

[00:57:35] Dr. Christian Amalu: Oh, yeah. I’ll start with Saint Cyril. So this quote, this was again, one of those mindbogglingly wonderful gems to come across. So Saint Cyril of Alexandria writes, “We became sinners through the disobedience of Adam in this way. He was created in immortality and in life. And in the paradise of pleasure, his manner was always and entirely absorbed in the vision of God, his body in tranquility and quiet, without any shameful pleasure, for there was in him no uproar of untoward movements.” That’s the word, “toward,” so T-O-W-A-R-D, but U-N before. So no untoward movements. “But when he fell into sin and became subject to corruption, then impure pleasures crept in upon the nature of the flesh and the law of the violent was brought forth in our members. Our nature, therefore, contracted the illness of sin.” 

[00:58:40] Dr. Christian Amalu: Talking about this natural state, what John Paul II would’ve called original innocence and original man. This idea that Adam had this stillness, this tranquility and quiet, focused on the image of God, and that with the introduction of sin, while he did not have this uproar of those untoward movements, that rising up of this division within, that sin changed that. It says right here, it crept upon the nature of the flesh. So there’s this almost corrupting kind of image that creates that division within, that fragmentation that we see described later on that we will get to hear more of from Augustine and company in the later episodes. But this idea that there was a stillness and a unity that existed and then that fragmentation took place within, within the human person really, just kind of highlighting. Again, not complete to the level that Evagrius had, but showing this model that’s really pointing toward evidence for parts work and a description of that division within man that has now become the norm from original sin. 

[00:59:50] Dr. Peter: It reminds me of James 4:1. “From where do these rivalries and contentions come? You know, he was talking about rivalries and contentions among the Christians, among the members of the body Christ. He says, do they not come from within you? And so the external is sort of mirroring the internal, so you’re seeing the Fathers take these ideas. I don’t know that Saint Cyril was quoting St. James, but kind of expanding upon it, developing the thought here and what the implications were.

[01:00:25] Dr. Gerry: Yeah, I’d have to look at that quote again closely and obviously in context and all that. But I heard in there that the fall, the fragmentation happens to the members, not that the members are created because of it. Which is a distinction that I’m making in my little disagreement with ultimately Father Chad Ripperger. Because I would argue that parts existed within Adam, but in Eden, originally they were all just in harmony, right? His parts were in perfect harmony, and he was in like, Saint Cyril is saying, you know, gazing at God. Like connecting totally with God.

[01:01:05] Dr. Christian Amalu: If you want, here’s the quote again. It’s, “The law of the violent was brought forth in our members.” You’re right. It’s not that our members were created, but our members now had a new law imposed, that illness of sin that they contract. Yeah.

[01:01:19] Dr. Gerry: And it’d be curious to understand better what is meant by the word members. You know, just like in James when it says the war between our members, but to me, even if they mean purely like physical members, it still doesn’t make sense unless you understand a connection between physical members and an interior world of some kind. It’s not like your arm is suddenly violent apart from you, apart from your inner life.

[01:01:47] Dr. Christian Amalu: Oh yes. Absolutely. And honestly, this quote, I found a couple others that kind of come in a pair, in my mind, these two quotes, even though the figures are centuries apart from each other. But it continues a new line of thought, and it wouldn’t be very long, but I got two quotes back to back. One of them, going off of St. Cyril of Alexandria. Evidence of this fragmentation from original sin, we have a law of violence in our members, whatever those members might be. But this gives me a little bit more of a clue as to what he might be talking about because this is developed further. So, St. Gregory of Nyssa, he says something which I think talks about IFS on a couple of different ways. So he says, he was addressing a specific argument here. He says, “Let no one suppose that there are three souls welded together in the human compound, each contemplated within its own boundaries, so that one might regard the human nature as a concoction of several souls. Rather, the true and perfect soul is by nature one, the intellectual and immaterial, which mingles with our material nature through the agency of the senses.”

[01:02:59] Dr. Christian Amalu: This does two things to me. Number one, it completely refutes Richard Schwartz’s idea that the self and the soul are the same thing, and that you don’t have multiple selves within you. This kind of puts the kibosh on that idea. You have one soul. There’s one human being. We don’t have that innate multiplicity of multiple persons within us. This is kind of giving, I think, the first kind of key in to that idea, but then toward the end, because that addresses the self more so to me than the parts. That last sentence, “the soul mingles with our material nature in the agency of the senses.” I’m like, interesting.

[01:03:42] Dr. Christian Amalu: So how does that actually work out? Centuries later we have St. John of Damascus, he says, “The soul, then, is a living being, simple and incorporeal, invisible to the bodily eyes. By its very nature, immortal, rational, and intelligent, shapeless, making use of an organic body, to which body it imparts life, growth, and feeling, and the faculty of generation; mind being its purest part, and in no way alien to it, for just as the eye is to the body, so is the mind to the soul.” This takes it a little bit further, kind of talking about this almost specialization, this dimensionality of the mind to the soul being that purest part. He would’ve used the term nous here for the mind. So talking about this being a faculty of the soul, then there must be other faculties. And then he says, “just as the eye is to the body, the mind is to the soul,” to this idea of, from Gregory of Nyssa, the soul that mingles with the material, John of Damascus gets a little bit more specific of how that might be. That there are faculties of the soul that operate through the different members of the body. And then it goes beyond the early Church Fathers period, beyond the patristics. This often, I think, very much lays the bed work for the works of Thomas Aquinas when he gets into the rational capacity of the soul, the different dimensions of the soul. And he kind of takes this and goes to a much deeper, more nuanced level. But what we have here is a continuity from Gregory of Nyssa to John of Damascus, all the way up to Thomas Aquinas, speaking about how the soul is expressed through our incarnational being, through our material body and the different faculties of our being, being expressed in this almost specialized way that I cannot help but think, parts. Any thoughts on that? 

[01:05:51] Dr. Gerry: I have to think on that. That’s really interesting. I love that you’re finding mining for these things and it’s so fascinating. The eye is to the body as the mind is to the soul. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And I have been finding in various writers from the patristics to the 13th century, just constantly using this word, this phrase “eye of the soul.” And so I love that, eye of the soul. I’ve even heard ear of the soul. But it’s the spiritual senses. We have all the spiritual senses and sort of a way of explaining it. But the eye of the soul, and the highest thing we can achieve is the vision of God. So the vision as the spiritual sense is the highest of all, in a sense. It’s possibly considered the highest of all those. Just this idea on a spiritual level that we can see in our soul. To me, it’s just fascinating. And I think it speaks to this interiority and this beauty within, and this ability to see and connect with God because if the inmost self is the image of God, and the Holy Spirit is present, indwells, and Christ is in the bridal chambers, in the center of the soul, and all these things come together to find out, guess what, God is present within us.

[01:07:14] Dr. Christian Amalu: Surprise.

[01:07:16] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. And we see that with the eye of the soul. How many of us don’t go there? We spend our lives externally, in our externals all the time. And we don’t slow down to discover this. And Dick Schwartz maybe didn’t discover exactly what we’re talking about here in terms of the eye of the soul and vision of God or anything, but he got as close to it in the natural realm as you could possibly kind of imagine when he discovered the self as being so beautifully compassionate and calm and creative and all that. So certainly, I think there’s a big link there.

[01:07:54] Dr. Christian Amalu: Absolutely. And we, as Catholics, can go deeper. We can go where Teresa of Avila goes, where we find Christ in the bride chamber.

[01:08:05] Dr. Gerry: Hence my icon’s coming, coming my way, hopefully soon.

[01:08:10] Dr. Peter: But as we come to a close here, I’m just curious if there is kind of two things. One, a takeaway, but maybe something practical, that people could grip onto, that they could sort of take away from this, I mean, without having to read, you know, the 54 volumes of the other Church Fathers and distill it all out. Like something they could hang on to, something that they could maybe practice in some way. I know that may be a tall order, but just anything that might come to mind along those lines today. 

[01:08:41] Dr. Gerry: I see it as there’s a practicality in prayer and contemplation and inner work. I know it still somewhat sounds sort of metaphysical or sounds kind of grand, but we’ve been talking about this presence of God within, and we’ve been talking about the image of God within, and we’ve been talking about the inmost self and everything. And so my encouragement for people is that it doesn’t have to be this big complex thing. Like we don’t have to be St. Teresa of Avila to have crazy ecstasies or anything. But we can slow things down in our prayer life to just sit with the inmost self, sit with ourself essentially, and notice the beauty. Just allow the presence of God in its transcendence, I suppose you can say, to allow yourself the time to sit with that inner self. And maybe parts are going to get in the way and we need to attend to them, and allow some of what they’re speaking about, which is the God of the cosmos, like God who created the universe, the logos, is present in a whisper within us. And I’m not sure that I’m being practical, but I’m saying like, can we sit with that? Can we slow down at least with that little truth and just see what happens when we sit with that truth and what God wants to reveal to us in that? Because sometimes in our prayer life, you know, I love the rosary and everything else, or other prayers, but they’re busy and there’s a lot of thinking going on and reflecting on this and that mystery. And there’s different prayers that have a lot of words going on. But to actually just sit with this idea that the God who created the universe is present within me in a sense and wants to be known. And that knowing might not have words. Anyway, that’s what I got.

[01:10:37] Dr. Peter: Thank you.

[01:10:40] Dr. Christian Amalu: Your off-the-cuff skills amaze me. Thank you. The practical and I have a natural animosity for one another, but I work with it as best I can. I’m hoping that this complements what Gerry said. A practical I would take away from this is, it might be twofold, but something along the lines of, each and every one of you listening is much richer and far more beautiful and wondrous interiorly than you probably have given yourself credit for. The landscape of the soul that Evagrius talks about and that we find in Maximus’ microcosm, Augustine’s City of God, spoiler alert. All of these things really point to the fact that each and every one of us is an image of the fullness of creation itself. 

[01:11:44] Dr. Christian Amalu: And I think what that’s what that has done for me on a practical level is, I’m not so surprised anymore when something comes up that’s unflattering or something comes up that I need to work on, or there’s something that comes up that seems complex like, oh dang, I thought I was working on myself, but I got this other thing. Well, I’ve got a whole world operating on the inside. That is a pretty tall order. And I think what that has done is that’s helped me to practice some very real gentleness. I’m not too shocked now when something shows up that I didn’t know before, that it feels like a new discovery because I feel a little bit more like an explorer, like a Magellan or a Columbus going around the globe, finding new components of this wondrous world that we’re in. I think what this has helped me with is not only knowing, wow, I can be an explorer in my own internal world, but this has been going on for centuries. The early Church Fathers were doing this, the scholastics, were doing this, all the way up to our modern times. This is the practice of Christianity: to be that explorer within yourself, and lends itself to that project of divinization or theosis that we were talking about before. This is how we grow more into the image and likeness of Christ.

[01:13:10] Dr. Peter: Wow. I’m reminded of Scripture. You know, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. I would add, I’m gonna go to 1992. This is not an early church father, in 1992, but St. John Paul II in Pastores Dabo Vobis, “human formation is the basis of all priestly formation.” He was writing about the formation of priests, but human formation being the basis of all formation, spiritual formation, intellectual formation, pastoral formation. That we have to also consider these metaphysical questions. We have to consider the raw humanity. It can’t just be spiritual castles built in the air. This incorporates all of us because we’ve been addressing the body as well. We spent time in this podcast on the body in episode 162, I think it was. And so we’re bringing in the fullness of the human person in the complexity, in the messiness, in the grittiness of it all, in the entirety of it all, in the reality of it all. And so to take these things seriously, to work also on the human level. I see so many well-meaning Catholics, sincere Catholics, devout Catholics, really focusing and zeroing in solely on the spiritual realm and neglecting the other aspects of the fullness of their person. And so to do that in harmony, I guess would be my takeaway. Can we can be thinking about these things? And so we offer some of those things through Souls and Hearts. I’ll talk about those. But yeah, wherever you find that, to take that seriously.

[01:14:48] Dr. Gerry: So, Peter, we don’t have to do an experiential exercise if there’s not enough time. I could do a one and a half minute little mini meditation / reflection on my readings of Evagrius.

[01:15:06] Dr. Peter: All right. How can I resist that? How can I resist that? If you as the viewers, if you have need to break this up and take it in over, you know, a day or two, or a week or a month or whatever, chop it up, that’s fine. We are going to have this experience.

[01:15:21] Dr. Gerry: It might even be a minute. It doesn’t have to be.

[01:15:23] Dr. Peter: No, no. By all means, we’re not, you know.

[01:15:26] Dr. Christian Amalu: I insist.

[01:15:28] Dr. Peter: Well, there we go. There’s the final word.

[01:15:32] Dr. Gerry: It’s, yeah, it’s really kind of more of a just meditation kind of, almost like a poem. You want me to do it?

[01:15:41] Dr. Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I cannot resist either.

[01:15:44] Dr. Gerry: Alright. Well, I’d like to put it into prayer. So in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Ah, dear Lord. Thank you for the wisdom of the early Church Fathers and in this moment I just want to reflect on and bring forward my thoughts and insights from Evagrius. Our passionate thoughts and deadly sins deceive the nous, the heart, keep us from experiencing our true self. It is through prayer, through contemplation, through theoria, that we ascend, that we know, that we realize our true dignity. In prayer we live with him day and night. The child of apatheia, detachment, is love, agape, tranquility, and calm. The glory and light of the soul. We see the kingdom of heaven when we contemplate God through the mirror of the soul and come to know the Holy Trinity, moving from multiplicity to simplicity in pure worship. The nous, the image of God, unites the body and soul, without divisions, without agendas. True self-knowledge leads to seeing God, the nous, the image of the Holy Trinity, always satisfied and yet insatiable. Amen. A little taste of Evagrian thinking filtered through Gerry Crete.

[01:18:23] Dr. Christian Amalu: Beautiful. I would like that on a laminated card. 

[01:18:33] Dr. Peter: Well, so as we bring this to a close, I just so much want to thank each one of you for this conversation, for this really inspiration. Just so much here that’s fascinating to me and exciting. And also just kind of the brotherhood here of us three together in this little system. Just being able to spend time together and to spend time with our audience. Just so grateful to both of you. Thank you so much.

[01:19:03] Dr. Christian Amalu: It’s just an absolute joy to be with the both of you.

[01:19:07] Dr. Peter: Wow. It warms my heart that you want to add episodes and continue the conversation. It’s a wonderful thing.

[01:19:14] Dr. Gerry: How could Saint Augustine not have his own episode? Yeah. What were we thinking?

[01:19:21] Dr. Christian Amalu: I mean, Bonaventure’s getting his own episode. It makes sense. 

[01:19:23] Dr. Gerry: Yeah. Well, Bonaventure deserved his, that’s for sure.

[01:19:30] Dr. Peter: We will be back next probably with St. Augustine, right? We’re going to do St. Augustine before St. Maximus. All right, if you are benefiting from these podcast episodes. Let people know. Share it like, subscribe, touch base with us in the comment section. We’d love to hear from you, right? The comment section on YouTube, Interior Integration 4 Catholics, that is our podcast channel. And upcoming episode, Interior Integration for Catholics number 168. We are going to St. Augustine. We’re going to talk about St. Augustine and parts work.

[01:20:10] Dr. Peter: Calling all Catholic adults who want to work on your human formation. The Resilient Catholics community is now open for new members. It’s for the rest of the month of June. We open in June. We open in October, and we open in February each year. We do parts work in the RCC. We work with the attachment needs and the integrity needs of your parts in the Resilient Catholics community. And the RCC provides a structured program in a community of like-minded Catholics to help you flourish and thrive. We meet in small groups weekly. We have so many resources, hundreds, literally hundreds of experiential exercises. Why? For your human formation. We have so many talks, so many workshops, so many office hours, so many different ways of connecting, and there are so many testimonials on our landing page of how the RCC has changed the lives of our members, helping them to love God, their neighbor, and themselves so much better. Check it all out. It’s at soulsandhearts.com/rcc. 

[01:21:16] Dr. Peter: I want to remind folks there is still room in the Formation for Formators retreat that will be on August 11th to the 14th, 2025. It is in Bloomington, Indiana, and you do not have to be a member of the Formation for Formators community. There’s a real come and see aspect of this. It is all about the human formation of the Catholic formulator because that’s often where the trouble is. It’s in the human formation of the Catholic formulator. That’s what often keeps us from being able to connect deeply. That’s what often is getting in the way of us being able to accompany those we form in a better way. Also, new groups of Catholic formators start in August and September. These are the foundations experiential groups. Those will be forming again in just a few months. Go to our website, get on the interest list. It’s at soulsandhearts.com/fff. 

[01:22:16] Dr. Peter: Now, as many of you already know, I host conversation hours on my cell phone privately, each person, every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time. It’s at 317-567-9594. You can ask about any of the things that we are discussing in these podcast episodes, anything that I’m writing in the semi-monthly reflections or other resources we have at Souls and Hearts. Check those out, office hours every Tuesday and Thursday, 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM. Talk with me, 10-minute conversation, 317-567-9594.

[01:22:54] Dr. Peter: So let’s go ahead and just bring this to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Thank you guys again, and thank you, our Lord, our Lady. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.