In the texts of the New Testament and the Fathers the soul is identified with the nous. The terms ‘nous’ and soul interchange. St. John of Damascus writes that the nous is the purest part of the soul, it is the eye of the soul: “The soul does not have the nous as something distinct from itself, but as its purest part, for as the eye is to the body, so is the nous to the soul.” Thus he is saying that the soul has the nous as its eye.
St. Gregory Palamas uses the term ‘nous’ in two senses. It is the whole soul, the image, and it is also a power of the soul, as we explained in another section, because, as the Trinitarian God is Nous, Word and Spirit, so the soul too has nous, word and spirit. According to this Athonite saint, the nous is identified with the soul, but it is also a power of the soul. I shall cite a characteristic passage containing these concepts. After the creation of man, writes the saint, the angels saw with their eyes “the soul of man joined to sense and flesh, and they were seeing another god not only come into being on earth through divine goodness, intellect and flesh the same man, but transformed by this extravagance and by the grace of God so as to be the same flesh and nous and spirit, and so that the soul had the image and likeness of God, as completely unified in nous and word and spirit.”
- from Orthodox Psychotherapy by Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos, p. 119.
