What a Passion Is

The definitional file of the collection. Pathos (πάθος, pl. πάθη; Slavonic страсть) is a settled movement of the soul contrary to nature — a disposition, not an episode. This file gives St. Maximus’ definition, separates a passion from an emotion, from an act of sin, and from the blameless passions that Christ assumed; identifies philautia as the root of the rest; and states why the passions have no nature of their own and are therefore healed rather than destroyed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word

Greek πάθος derives from παθεῖν, “to undergo, to suffer”. Its primary sense is passive: something that happens to one. The same root gives the Passion of Christ, and gives “pathology” its meaning of what a body suffers. Church Slavonic and Russian страсть (strast’) is built on the same logic, from the root of страдать, “to suffer” — and, like the Greek, does double duty for the sufferings of the martyrs (страстотерпец, “passion-bearer”) and for the disorders of the soul.

The etymology carries the doctrine. A passion is not something a person actively possesses but something he undergoes: a condition in which he is moved rather than moving. This is why the tradition treats the passions as a kind of slavery, and why the promise attached to their healing is freedom.

Modern English “passion”, by contrast, has drifted toward intensity and even admiration — a passion for justice, a passionate performer. Nothing of that is in the Greek term as the ascetic writers use it, and importing it makes them unintelligible.

The Definition

St. Maximus the Confessor gives the standard definition: “Passion is a movement of the soul contrary to nature, either towards irrational love or towards senseless hatred of something or on account of something material” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love II.16; in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1981; see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Centuries on Love).

Four elements of this are load-bearing.

“Movement of the soul” — a passion belongs to the soul’s own powers, the desiring and incensive faculties treated at The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin. It is not an alien substance in the person.

“Contrary to nature” (παρὰ φύσιν) — the standard of judgment is what the faculty is for. Desire moving toward God is according to nature; desire moving toward a created thing as though it were the end is contrary to nature. The category is teleological, not quantitative: the fault is never that a person desires too much, but that he desires the wrong thing as an end.

“Irrational love or senseless hatred” — the two directions correspond to the two powers, desire and the incensive faculty, and the whole catalogue of passions divides between them.

A disposition, not an act. St. John Climacus defines a passion as a vice that has lodged in the soul over a long time and become, through habit, second nature, so that the person now moves toward it of himself and without needing an occasion (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982). A single angry outburst is not a passion; anger as a settled orientation is.

Passion, Emotion, and Sin

Three distinctions have to be held apart, and conflating any of them produces a characteristic error.

A passion is not an emotion. Emotions are episodes, mostly involuntary, and largely innocent; passions are dispositions formed by repeated consent. Many emotions are not passions at all — grief at a death, delight in a friend, fear in danger. And a passion may be fully operative with no felt affect whatever: a settled avarice can be perfectly calm. The literature treats emotional states as evidence, sometimes reliable and sometimes not, of what is settled underneath. To read the eight thoughts as a catalogue of emotions to be eliminated is the single commonest modern misreading and produces a spirituality of self-suppression that the Fathers do not teach (see Cautions for the Modern Reader).

A passion is not an act of sin. Sins are things done; passions are what makes them easy. The tradition treats a person who has confessed an act and a person who has been freed of the disposition as being in different conditions, and it is the second that the ascetic literature is about. This is why confession alone is not the whole programme and why the Fathers speak of struggle continuing after forgiveness.

A passion is not a demon. The ascetic writers attribute the suggestion of thoughts partly to demonic agency, sometimes with great vividness, and Evagrius habitually names the thought and the demon interchangeably. But no author in this tradition allows the attribution to excuse. The demon proposes; the person consents; the passion is his. The strictness with which the tradition holds a person responsible for what he has consented to is the reason its demonology does not become fatalism (see St. Antony the Great: The Demons; St. Antony the Great: Spiritual Warfare Teaching).

The Blameless Passions

The Fathers use πάθος in a second, neutral sense, and the distinction is dogmatically important.

St. John of Damascus devotes a chapter of the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith to “the natural and blameless passions” — τὰ φυσικὰ καὶ ἀδιάβλητα πάθη: hunger, thirst, weariness, distress, fear, the shrinking from death, and the like. These are not disorders. They belong to human nature in its present condition, they involve no fault, and Christ assumed them — he hungered, thirsted, wearied, wept, was troubled in Gethsemane, and died (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.20; trans. NPNF II/9).

The Christological stake is direct. If every πάθος were sinful, Christ’s assumption of the human condition would be compromised, and the axiom that what is not assumed is not healed would collapse (Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistle 101; trans. NPNF II/7; see Christology). The tradition therefore keeps two senses of the word firmly apart: the blameless passions of nature, and the passions of the soul that are contrary to nature. When an ascetic text says “the passions”, it means the second.

There is a third and rarer use in which πάθος is positively good — the language of “suffering divine things” (παθὼν τὰ θεῖα), used by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite of Hierotheus, and taken up by Maximus for the soul’s passive reception of God (Dionysius, On the Divine Names 2.9; trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality, New York: Paulist Press, 1987). Here what is undergone is God’s own action, and the passivity is the creature’s proper relation to grace. The vocabulary is deliberately paradoxical and should not be confused with the ascetic sense.

Philautia: The Mother of the Passions

St. Maximus reduces the catalogue to a single root: φιλαυτία, self-love, Russian самолюбие — the irrational attachment to one’s own body and one’s own comfort, from which, he says, all the passions are generated. Its opposite is not self-hatred but agape, and Maximus’ whole ascetic teaching is organized as the movement from self-love to love of God and neighbour (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love II.8; III.8, 56–57; in The Philokalia, vol. 2; and Letter 2, “On Love”, in Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor, London: Routledge, 1996).

Two things follow. The catalogue of eight or of thirty is not a list of independent diseases but the branching of one; and the remedy is not eight separate disciplines but a single reorientation. This is why Maximus can treat love as both the goal of the ascetic life and its method (see From Dispassion to Love).

The Passions Have No Nature of Their Own

The final structural point is the one that keeps the ascetic programme from becoming Manichaean.

Evil has no substance. It is not a thing God made, nor a rival principle, but the misdirection of something God made — a privation and a misuse. It follows that a passion is parasitic: gluttony is the misuse of the created goodness of food, avarice of the created goodness of provision, vainglory of the created goodness of honour, and even pride of the created dignity of the person. Nothing in the list corresponds to a faculty that ought not to exist.

Maximus draws the conclusion explicitly: the passions become good in those who strive, when they are wisely detached from bodily things and turned to the acquisition of heavenly things (Maximus, Questions to Thalassius 1; trans. Maximos Constas, The Fathers of the Church 136, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018). This is why the therapy is redirection and not amputation, why the term of the process is love and not numbness, and why apatheia — the healed condition of the passible part — is not the extinction of feeling (see Dispassion and What It Is Not).

It is also why a person’s passions are, in a hard but liberating sense, a map of his capacity. What is disordered in him is a good power aimed wrongly, and the same energy that drives the passion is the energy that will, if turned, drive the virtue. The Fathers say this of the great sinners who became great saints, and they mean it as description rather than consolation.

See Also

References

  • Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. On the Divine Names 2.9. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101 (to Cledonius). Trans. NPNF II/7.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 15. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III.20. Trans. NPNF II/9.
  • Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996. (Includes Letter 2, “On Love”.)
  • Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love, II.8, II.16, III.8, III.56–57. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  • Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Question 1. Trans. Maximos Constas. The Fathers of the Church 136. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018.
  • The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Glossary, s.v. “Passion”.)