A curious idiom in English and difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. If I say, “I changed my mind,” it looks like I am saying I had one mind, but I swapped it out for another. The closest analogues after all are expressions like “I changed my clothes” or “I changed a tire.” But how can I even get a grip on my mind, never mind change it? And how would I know that it was a new mind there, rather than the old one still? And would it be mindless me who was doing the changing, or if not, who?
One frustrated contributor to an online discussion list asks what the difference is between “I changed my mind” and “I have changed my mind.” Easy enough: if I changed my mind in the past, then, now, I have changed my mind.
But what about (on the same list) “my mind had been changed” or “I had a change of mind”? Can we say such things? I think not. Mind-changes which are passive don’t find easy expression in our language. And yet, not so changes of heart. “I had a change of heart” makes perfect sense. The mind seems more active – more, if you will, autonomous. Something can happen to me which makes my heart change. But if I don’t change my mind, it looks like nothing can change it.
If the ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin had been a Christian, he would have been fascinated by these facts of language. Christians must be mindful of the mind. Our Lord underlined the fact. Deuteronomy 6:5 says only: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” But Our Lord in the New Covenant took pains (it’s recorded in all three synoptic Gospels) to add: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, and with all your mind.”
The Church Fathers in general seemed to have thought of that addition as a kind of summary and pinnacle of the others. Yet Theophylact sees it as directed at a new power of the soul, which was as if discovered and emphasized by the Greeks: “There is also another power, the rational, which He calls the mind, and that too is to be given whole to God.” Those who worship the Logos made flesh must worship him in spirit, and mind.
It’s disputed among scholars whether Our Lord spoke Greek. I have become persuaded that He did. In any case, since he was omniscient, he would have known about Greek. In particular, he would have known that the main word for conversion and repentance in Greek was metanoia, literally, a change of mind. He would have known that the main word for repentance, in the Scripture of the Church he was founding, would refer to the mind.
This fact is hidden in translations. “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32): literally, I have come to call sinners to change their minds. “Thus it is written,” the Lord says to his disciples just before ascending into Heaven, “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” (Luke 24:46-47), – literally, “change of mind and forgiveness of sins.” Forgiveness is linked to a change of mind.
It’s a favorite idiom of St. Paul’s. After he had rebuked the Corinthians for not excluding a public sinner from their gatherings, a man who was committing adultery with his mother-in-law (1 Corinthians 5:1), he writes later that he was pained that his rebuke had caused them pain, and yet “you were grieved into repenting,” that is, into changing your mind. (2 Corinthians 7:9) And they did change their minds.
In one of his most beautiful passages, St. Paul says that he wants to see Christians metamorphosed, “changed in form,” by making their minds new, or more precisely their intellect (nous):
I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2)
Aristotle famously called law “intellect, shorn of desire.” (Politics 1287a32) One can say, the desired change of mind is towards lawfulness.
We think of repentance as bound up with grief. On the other hand, we think of changing one’s mind as emotionless. But in 2 Corinthians, St. Paul takes grief that leads to repentance to be one thing, and the repentance itself, the change of mind, to be something else. Clearly, the process he describes in Romans 12 is a deliberate undertaking.
The beauty of “I changed my mind” is in the completeness it signals. “Did you want the steak after all?” “No, I changed my mind and decided upon fish.” Steak is just no longer in view. We are blind to the steak. We are thinking about wine pairings with fish. Also, we confess implicitly that we were thinking about steak, dwelling on it, wanting it, imagining it.
How disarming, for its simplicity, it could be to speak in this way! “Yeah, before I was a Christian, I used to sleep around. But after I accepted Christ as my Savior and Lord, and I learned his commandments, I changed my mind.”
“If you really have changed your mind, as you say, then through what you do, provide convincing evidence to me that this is so.” It’s a paraphrase, and yet a perfectly precise account of the meaning of the Baptist’s words, which the Church puts before us at the beginning of Lent: Bear fruit worthy of repentance. (Matthew 3:8)
