The Whole Person in a Fragmented Age

When I prayed the Angelus in Latin recently, a single word caught my attention: “Gratiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde.”In English, we say, “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts.” But in Latin, it is not cor (heart). It is mens (mind). Literally, “Pour your grace into our minds.”

That difference stopped me. “Mind” in modern English sounds cold and abstract, more like a machine for analysis than a place for grace to dwell. Yet in Latin, mens does not mean the calculating intellect of modern psychology or neuroscience. It means the whole interior person, the seat of thought, will, and affection together, which is what heart (לֵב) meant in ancient Hebrew. It is the part of us capable of knowing truth, loving the good, and receiving the divine.

Yet in modern English, we usually understand heart as the seat of emotion. That subtle shift in meaning reveals something more serious than a mere translation issue. It exposes a deeper fragmentation in how we conceive the human person. The unity that the Latin mens assumes, where intellect, will, and affection act together, has been replaced by the idea of competing inner “parts.” What once described a harmony of soul has become a vocabulary of division.

The Latin prayer assumes a unity we have largely lost. In our modern languages, we speak of “head and heart” as opposites, and of the will as something separate from both. But a human being is not made of three disconnected compartments. The intellect, will, and emotions are distinct powers, but they belong to one living soul. When the Angelus asks that grace be poured into our mentibus, it is praying for the renewal of the whole person, not one isolated faculty.

This older vision of the person has deep roots in Aristotle’s philosophy and in the Christian tradition that grew from it. Aristotle saw all things, especially the human person, as ordered toward a purpose, a telos. The intellect naturally seeks truth, the will naturally seeks the good, and the emotions follow reason when properly trained. Together they form a single harmony of being. Saint Thomas Aquinas later built upon this framework, showing how divine grace perfects nature by healing the disorder of sin and restoring that inner harmony (Summa Theologiae I–II, q.109–114).

Modern philosophy broke this unity. The Enlightenment exalted reason but stripped it of meaning, reducing it to calculation and mechanism. Romanticism reacted by enthroning feeling as the truest expression of the self, detaching emotion from intellect and virtue. Voluntarism then claimed the will’s power to choose as the defining mark of personhood, regardless of truth or goodness. Each movement, in trying to correct the others, divided the person still further.

The result is visible all around us. We have become technicians of the material world who no longer ask what anything is for. We know how things work, but not why they exist. Our culture measures human worth by productivity and utility, not by intrinsic dignity. When the question of “why” is dismissed as unscientific or irrelevant, meaning itself begins to fade.

This is the crisis Josef Pieper identified in the twentieth century. In Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), he argued that modern humanity has come to define itself as homo faber, the worker. Everything, even rest, is valued only as a means to further work. True leisure, he insisted, is not idleness but the capacity to receive reality as a gift. It is an inner stillness that allows us to contemplate what is, rather than to manipulate it.

Pieper drew upon a neglected virtue from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (IV.8): eutrapelia (εὐτραπελία), which means “pleasantness in play” or “graceful recreation.” Aquinas treated it as a part of temperance (ST II–II, q.168), the virtue that governs how we rest and find joy. Eutrapelia is the balance between dull severity and reckless frivolity. It allows the human spirit to breathe, to delight rightly, and to find refreshment in what is good and beautiful. Pieper saw in eutrapelia the antidote to the “total work” mentality of the modern world. It reminds us that joy, rest, and wonder are not diversions from serious life but expressions of its fullness.

To recover leisure in Pieper’s sense is to recover the ancient understanding of what it means to be human. The person is not a machine for production but a creature capable of contemplation and praise. When we gaze upon truth, create beauty, or celebrate goodness for their own sake, we act according to our highest nature. In such moments, we affirm that being itself is good.

The Christian vision elevates this even further. The Sabbath is not divine idleness; it is divine joy. God rests on the seventh day, not from exhaustion but in delight. In Christ, humanity is invited into that same rest, that same contemplative fulfillment. The Angelus begins with this reality: “The Word was made flesh.” Grace descends, and we receive it. It is a prayer of receptivity, not of achievement.

To pray mentibus nostris infunde is to acknowledge that grace seeks to enter the deepest unity of the person, not merely the feelings or the intellect, but the entire human being made in God’s image. It is a prayer for integrity, for the reunification of what modernity has torn apart.

Aristotle began his philosophy in wonder, not doubt, like modern philosophers. Aquinas said that grace perfects nature, not destroys it. Pieper reminded us that culture begins in leisure, not labor. All three speak with one voice across the centuries: human life has meaning only when it opens itself to truth and goodness beyond itself.

When I pray the Angelus now, I linger over that single word: mentibus. It reminds me that God’s grace seeks not a fragment of who I am but the whole: the mind that knows, the will that loves, and the heart that rejoices. Perhaps the renewal of our fragmented world will begin where all renewal truly begins, in letting grace fill the entire person until mind and heart, thought and love, once again move together in harmony toward the One who made them.

References

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, ch. 8 (on eutrapelia / εὐτραπελία).

• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.109–114 (on grace) and II–II, q.168 (on eutrapelia).

• Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (Faber & Faber, 1952).