The Catalogue and the Chief Passions

The passions one by one, with their Greek and Slavonic and with the misreadings each attracts; the division into bodily and mental passions; the heads the Eastern tradition added beyond the eight — rancour, envy, judging others, insensibility; and the reduction of the whole field, in St. Maximus and St. John Climacus, to a very few roots.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

How the Catalogue Is Organized

Three organizing principles are used across the literature, and they are complementary rather than competing.

By the power deformed. Gluttony, unchastity, and avarice deform the desiring power; anger, rancour, and envy the incensive power; vainglory and pride the rational power itself (see The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin). This determines the remedy: self-control for the first group, love and forbearance for the second, humility and prayer for the third (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love II.47; in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1981).

Bodily and mental. The Greek writers divide σωματικὰ πάθη from ψυχικὰ πάθη — those consummated through the body and those operating wholly in the soul. St. John Cassian’s parallel division into vices that require bodily action and vices that do not is the source of the distinction in the West (Institutes V–XII, trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 58, New York: Newman Press, 2000; and see St. John Climacus: The Bodily and Mental Passions). The practical corollary the Fathers draw is uncomfortable and consistent: the mental passions are the graver, the harder to detect, and the last to be healed.

By sequence. The eight are ordered from the grossest to the subtlest, so that the list is also a map of what attacks a person at each stage (see The Eight Thoughts and the Seven Sins).

The Eight

Gluttony — γαστριμαργία — чревоугодие. Disordered relation to food: not eating, but eating as an end, and by extension the whole appetite for bodily gratification of which food is the first instance. The literature treats it as first because it is the most constant and because it conditions the rest; Climacus devotes a step to “that clamorous mistress, the stomach” (Ladder, Step 14). It does not mean that food is evil or that fasting is contempt for the body — the Church’s fasts are periodic and are broken by her own feasts.

Unchastity — πορνεία — блуд. Disordered sexual desire, in act, in fantasy, and in the settled orientation of the desiring power. The Fathers treat thought and act together here more than anywhere else, on the warrant of Matthew 5:28. Climacus’ Step 15 is the classic treatment, and it is also where he gives the stages of assent (see What a Thought Is and the Stages of Assent).

Avarice — φιλαργυρία — сребролюбие. Literally “love of silver”. The literature is careful that the passion is not the possession of things but the attachment to them, which is why it is treated as fully available to a monk who owns nothing. Climacus pairs Step 16 (love of money) with Step 17 (poverty) to make exactly this point.

Dejection — λύπη — печаль. Sorrow at the loss or frustration of what was desired; the sadness of the world, distinguished by the Fathers from godly grief (2 Corinthians 7:10) and from penthos, the joy-creating mourning for sin which they regard as a virtue. This is one of the places where the vocabulary most needs care: the tradition does not treat sorrow as such as a passion, and it prizes tears (see The Virtues and the Order of Progress).

Anger — ὀργή — гнев. The incensive power turned against the neighbour instead of against evil. The Fathers are severe about it precisely because they value the faculty: anger is the power given to a person for the fight, and the tragedy of the passion is that the weapon is turned the wrong way. Climacus treats freedom from anger at Step 8 and, at Step 9, the settled form he considers worse — μνησικακία, remembrance of wrongs (see St. John Climacus: Anger and the Tongue).

Listlessness — ἀκηδία — уныние. Treated separately below.

Vainglory — κενοδοξία — тщеславие. “Empty opinion”: the craving for the good regard of others, and the reference of one’s acts to that regard. It is distinguished from pride, of which it is the outrider: vainglory wants to be thought well of, pride does not need anyone’s opinion at all. The Fathers observe that it feeds on the virtues rather than the vices and is therefore the specific danger of a person who is doing well — including, they note without irony, the vainglory of appearing humble (Climacus, Ladder, Step 22).

Pride — ὑπερηφανία — гордость, гордыня. The refusal of God’s help and of one’s own creaturehood; the reference of one’s good to oneself. It is last in the list because it is the temptation of the advanced, and it is treated as the root from which the others draw life. Climacus places it at Step 23, together with the blasphemous thoughts that so often accompany it, and the tradition’s remedy is not self-abasement as a technique but the truth: that everything a person has, he received.

Akedia in Particular

ἀκηδία — Slavonic and Russian уныние — is the most distinctive of the eight and the hardest to render. English versions give “listlessness”, “despondency”, “dejection”, “accidie”, “sloth”, “spiritual torpor”; none is adequate, and “sloth” in particular is misleading, since the condition is characteristically restless rather than lazy.

Evagrius’ description is the longest chapter of the Praktikos and remains the best. The demon of akedia, “also called the noonday demon” (Psalm 90:6 LXX), attacks the monk at the middle of the day and makes the sun appear to stand still; it makes him look repeatedly out of the window, watch for visitors, hate the place he is in, hate his work, hate the brethren; it suggests that charity has departed from that community, that he could be more useful somewhere else, that God can be served just as well elsewhere; and it produces a longing for other places and other lives (Evagrius, Praktikos 12; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972). Cassian’s treatment in Institutes X is the Latin classic and adds the counsel of manual labour as remedy.

Two cautions. First, akedia is not a diagnosis of clinical depression, and the two must not be equated; the ascetic literature is not a psychiatric manual, and a person who is unwell needs treatment, not a step of the Ladder (see Cautions for the Modern Reader). Second, the standard remedy — remain in the place, keep the rule, do the work — presupposes a stable monastic setting and a spiritual father, and does not transfer unaltered to circumstances that a person may in fact need to leave.

Beyond the Eight

Later Greek writers add heads freely, and the additions are as much part of the working vocabulary as the eight.

Rancour — μνησικακία — памятозлобие: the remembrance of wrongs; anger become permanent, and, for Climacus, a bar to prayer (Ladder, Step 9).
Envy — φθόνος — зависть: grief at another’s good, the one head Gregory the Great added to the Western seven and which the Greeks treat as a species of the incensive power.
Judging others — κατάκρισις — осуждение: condemnation of the neighbour, given enormous weight in Russian ascetic writing and in the Optina counsels, on the warrant of Matthew 7:1 (see The Optina Elders: The Optina Spiritual Legacy).
Insensibility — ἀναισθησία — окаменение / нечувствие: the “petrified insensitivity” of a person who knows the truth and is unmoved by it; Climacus gives it a step of its own (Ladder, Step 18) and calls it a death of the soul before the body’s death. It is not in the eight and has no Western equivalent in the capital-vice tradition.
Talkativeness, falsehood, unmanly fear occupy Steps 11, 12, and 21 of the Ladder respectively.

The Ladder’s own sequence is worth having, because it is the most influential single ordering in the tradition: after the introductory steps of renunciation, detachment, exile, obedience, repentance, remembrance of death, and mourning (1–7), the war with the passions occupies Steps 8–23, the higher virtues 24–26 (simplicity, humility, discernment), and the summit 27–30 (stillness, prayer, dispassion, and the triad of faith, hope, and love) (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982; see St. John Climacus: The Work and Its Structure).

The Chief Passions

Against the tendency of a catalogue to multiply, the great authors keep reducing it.

Maximus reduces to one root: philautia, self-love — the origin of all the passions, whose opposite is love of God and neighbour (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in The Philokalia, vol. 2; see What a Passion Is).

Maximus also works with a triad. He repeatedly treats gluttony, avarice, and vainglory as the three general thoughts through which the enemy attacks, from which the others derive — and reads them against the three temptations in the wilderness, where Christ is tempted with bread, with the kingdoms of the world, and with the spectacular sign (Matthew 4:1–11; Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in The Philokalia, vol. 2). The scheme is not a rival to the eight but a compression of them.

The tradition treats pride as the last and the root. The eight end with it, Gregory the Great placed it above his seven as the queen of the vices (see The Eight Thoughts and the Seven Sins), and the Eastern writers regard it as the passion that survives the defeat of all the others and can feed on that defeat.

Three consequences follow for anyone using the catalogue.

The list is a working instrument, not a dogma. No council has enumerated the passions; the authors differ; the numbers vary. Where this collection gives a list, it gives it as a particular author’s.

Progress does not reduce the danger; it changes it. The vainglory of the person who has conquered gluttony is the reason the order runs the way it does.

The catalogue is for use on oneself. The uniform testimony of the tradition — and the reason judging others has its own place among the passions — is that this vocabulary is diagnostic in the first person and slanderous in the third. A reader who finishes this file with a clear view of his neighbour’s passions has used it exactly backwards.

References

Cassian, John. The Institutes, Books V–XII (esp. Book X, on acedia). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, 6–14 (esp. 12, on akedia). Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love, II.47 and passim. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (John Cassian, “On the Eight Vices”; glossary, s.v. “Passion”.)
Scripture: Psalm 90:6 (LXX) / 91:6; Matthew 4:1–11; 5:28; 7:1; 2 Corinthians 7:10.