The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin

The powers of the soul in which the passions arise, and the account of the fall that explains why they are disordered without making them evil. This file sets out the tripartite scheme — rational, incensive, and desiring — that the ascetic writers inherited from Greek philosophy and put to a new use; defines the “passible part” (pathetikon meros); and shows how the patristic reading of the “garments of skin” of Genesis 3:21 keeps the ascetic programme from becoming a war against human nature.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Three Powers

The ascetic writers analyse the soul into three powers:

λογιστικόν (logistikon), the rational power — the faculty that knows, judges, and directs;
θυμός or θυμικόν (thymos, thymikon), the incensive power — the aggressive, repelling, zealous faculty, of which anger is the most obvious manifestation;
ἐπιθυμία or ἐπιθυμητικόν (epithymia, epithymetikon), the desiring or appetitive power — the faculty of longing and attraction.

The English “incensive power” is the Philokalia translators’ coinage for thymos and has no ordinary-language equivalent; “irascible” is the older Latin rendering and “temper” or “spirit” the nearest colloquial approximations, all of them narrower than the Greek. The Slavonic and Russian equivalents are раздражительная сила (incensive) and желательная сила (desiring), with the rational power as словесная or разумная сила.

Taken together, the incensive and desiring powers are called the passible part of the soul — τὸ παθητικὸν μέρος, Russian страстная часть. This is the region in which the passions arise, and the reason for the name is simply that these are the powers capable of being moved.

Where the Scheme Comes From, and What Was Done With It

The threefold division is Platonic in origin (Republic IV, 435b–441c, where the soul is divided into the reasoning, the spirited, and the appetitive), and it was standard in later Greek philosophical psychology. Christian writers took it over without disguise. St. Gregory of Nyssa uses it in On the Making of Man; Evagrius makes it the working frame of his ascetic analysis; St. Maximus the Confessor and St. John Climacus use it as a matter of course.

The borrowing should be acknowledged plainly rather than minimized, because what matters is the transformation, and the transformation is only visible against the source. In the Platonic scheme the two lower powers are, at best, to be governed by reason and, at worst, the drag of the body upon the soul. In the Christian use they are created powers with a proper object, and the ascetic aim is not their suppression but their redirection.

Evagrius states the transformed version exactly: the rational soul acts according to nature when its desiring part longs for virtue, its incensive part fights on behalf of virtue, and its rational part is given to the contemplation of created beings (Evagrius, Praktikos 86; trans. Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI, 1972). Nothing is being amputated. Desire is meant to desire; anger is meant to be angry. The disorder is in the object, not in the faculty.

St. Maximus draws the consequence for the whole ascetic project: the passions are not evil in themselves but become so through the misuse of the soul’s powers, and in those who strive they are turned to good use — desire becoming longing for God, and the incensive power becoming the energy of the struggle against evil (Maximus, Questions to Thalassius 1; trans. Maximos Constas, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, The Fathers of the Church 136, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018; see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Centuries on Love). This is the single most important corrective to a moralized reading of the ascetic literature, and it is the ground of everything said in What a Passion Is.

The practical use of the scheme is diagnostic. A passion is classified by the power it deforms: gluttony, unchastity, and avarice are disorders of the desiring power; anger, rancour, and envy of the incensive power; vainglory and pride of the rational power itself. And the remedies are matched to the power: self-control and fasting to the desiring power, love and forbearance to the incensive, humility and prayer to the rational (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love II.47; III.3; in The Philokalia, vol. 2, London: Faber and Faber, 1981; see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions).

The Garments of Skin

If the powers of the soul are created good, why are they so reliably disordered? The tradition’s answer is the fall, read in the Eastern way: not inherited guilt, but inherited mortality, corruption, and a darkened condition in which the passions dominate and the nous is turned from God. That account is set out at Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin and in Theosis: The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound, and this file agrees with both.

The motif that connects it to the passible part is the garments of skin: “Also for Adam and his wife the LORD God made tunics of skin, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus read the garments not as animal hides but as the mode of existence given to human beings after the fall — mortality and everything that follows from it: biological life as we now have it, appetite, reproduction, labour, and the whole apparatus by which mortal creatures organize survival.

Panayiotis Nellas made the motif central to modern Orthodox anthropology, and his insistence on its two-fold character is the point that matters here (Nellas, Deification in Christ, trans. Norman Russell, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987, 60–63; see Panayiotis Nellas: The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus and Consequence and Provision). The garments are a consequence of sin — they are not part of human nature as created, and to call present human existence simply “human nature” is to mistake the wound for the body. And the garments are a gift — God clothed them, so that fallen man might survive and have a field in which to live and repent.

Two qualifications, both already made in the sibling treatment and repeated here so that this file does not appear to claim more: the reading of the garments as comprising the whole biological and cultural order is a theologoumenon elaborated by a modern theologian upon patristic materials, not a conciliar definition; and Nellas’ chapter is not to be read back into Nyssa and Maximus as though they had written it.

The Pleasure–Pain Cycle

Maximus supplies the mechanism that connects the garments to the passible part, and it is the most illuminating single analysis in the tradition of why the passions have the grip they have.

At the fall, the human being turned his capacity for pleasure away from God toward the senses. Because sensual pleasure in a mortal creature is always followed by pain, and because the creature then seeks further pleasure to escape the pain, the two became a single circuit driving human life: pleasure sought, pain incurred, pleasure sought again. Death, which entered as the consequence, is also what makes the circuit inescapable, since a mortal creature’s fear of pain is finally the fear of death. Christ broke the circuit by accepting the pain without having sought the pleasure — being born without the pleasure of ordinary generation and dying without having deserved death (Maximus, Questions to Thalassius 61; trans. Constas, FC 136, 2018; and see the discussion in Paul M. Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, ch. 6).

Two things follow for the vocabulary. First, the passions are not merely bad habits; they are the ordinary functioning of a mortal creature organizing itself around the avoidance of pain, which is why they are so hard to shift and why willpower alone does not shift them. Second, the remedy is not primarily prohibition but the reordering of desire toward an object that does not decay — which is why the tradition treats love, and not restraint, as the term of the ascetic life (see From Dispassion to Love).

Transformation, Not Abolition

The conclusion governs the whole collection. Because the garments are a merciful provision as well as a consequence, and because the passible part is a created good disordered rather than an intruder, the ascetic programme aims at transformation, not abolition.

Christ assumed the fallen condition — hunger, thirst, weariness, the fear of death, all that the Fathers call the blameless passions — and did not decline it; he put it on and turned it (see What a Passion Is). The monk who fasts does not despise food, and the celibate does not despise marriage; he lives, imperfectly and by anticipation, in the mode of the resurrection (see Theosis: The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound; Orthodox Monasticism: Ascesis, Hesychia, and Theosis).

The corollary for reading is a caution. Ascetic texts that speak harshly of the body, of food, or of the flesh are speaking about the disordered use of created goods, in a rhetorical register formed by the desert; they are not teaching that matter is evil, a doctrine the Church condemned wherever it appeared. Where an author’s language does seem to go further, the safe rule is the one the tradition itself applies: read the hard sayings in the light of the confessed doctrine of creation and of the Incarnation, not the other way round.

References

Blowers, Paul M. Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, 86. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.
Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man. Trans. NPNF II/5.
Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Questions 1 and 61. Trans. Maximos Constas. The Fathers of the Church 136. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018.
Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love, II.47; III.3. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987, 60–63.
Plato. Republic IV, 435b–441c. (The origin of the tripartite scheme.)
Scripture: Genesis 3:21.