Second, on "nous", for the monastic fathers the term serves chiefly to denote the highest faculty of the soul, that capacity built into us by God for the direct perception of spiritual realities. The word "heart" is also used similarly, and the two tend to overlap though they are not quite synonymous. The Latin-derived word, intellect, is the preferred translation for "nous" in, for example, the English translation of the Philokalia by Bishop Kallistos Ware and others -- so I think that the traditional definition of the parts of the soul that you mention is, on the whole, pretty close to what we find in the Greek Fathers. They, too, distinguish between reason, "dianoia", and the intellective or noetic capacity based on the "nous". The former is the capacity for reasoned analysis and synthesis, while the latter more closely approaches our word "intuition" -- i.e., a knowledge which comes to us directly and immediately, not via the mediation of the rational process. [The Western Father] Bonaventure has, I think, similar ideas.
