08 — Apatheia

ἀπάθεια, Slavonic бесстрастие, is the term of this vocabulary most likely to be misread. It is not Stoic insensibility, not the extinction of feeling, not impassivity, and not sinlessness. It is the healed condition of the passible part of the soul, in which desire and the incensive power move toward God instead of against him. And it is not the goal: ἀγάπη is, and the tradition says so explicitly.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The English “dispassion” is a fair rendering of the Greek and a poor guide to the thing. An English reader hears apathy, or hears an ideal of imperturbability, and concludes that the ascetic life aims at emotional flatness — a conclusion that St. Isaac the Syrian’s description of the merciful heart, weeping for animals and for demons, refutes at a stroke.

Dispassion and What It Is Not gives the definition and the five denials, sets out the tradition’s teaching on degrees and on the persistence of the possibility of falling, and treats the genuinely open scholarly question — whether Christian apatheia is continuous with the Stoic term or a transformation of it — together with St. Jerome’s attack on the word as heretical presumption and St. John Cassian’s decision to translate around it.

From Dispassion to Love makes the constructive point. Dispassion is a link in a chain and not its end: Evagrius calls love the offspring of dispassion, St. Maximus says love is begotten of dispassion, and St. John Climacus places dispassion at Step 29 of the Ladder and faith, hope, and love at Step 30. The measure of the ascetic life is therefore love of neighbour and of enemies, not calm.

File Contents
Dispassion and What It Is Not The term and its definition in Evagrius, Climacus, and Maximus; five denials; degrees of dispassion and the persistence of freedom to fall; the §4.2 question of the Stoic relation; Jerome’s attack and Cassian’s puritas cordis
From Dispassion to Love Apatheia as mother of love, not substitute for it; the chains in Evagrius and Maximus; the Ladder‘s own ordering; Isaac’s merciful heart as the decisive counter-example to a Stoic reading; the criterion of love of enemies

See Also