Dispassion and What It Is Not

ἀπάθεια (apatheia), Slavonic бесстрастие, is the healed condition of the passible part of the soul — the state in which desire and the incensive power move toward God rather than against him. This file gives the definition, states the five things dispassion is not, sets out the tradition’s teaching on its degrees and on the persistence of the freedom to fall, and reports the genuinely open question of its relation to the Stoic term, including St. Jerome’s attack on the word and St. John Cassian’s decision to translate around it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word

ἀπάθεια is formed from the alpha privative and πάθος: literally “passionlessness”. Church Slavonic and Russian бесстрастие is an exact calque, без- + страсть. English gives “dispassion” (the Philokalia), “passionlessness”, and, in older translations, “impassibility” — the last being the most misleading, since it is also the theological term for God’s incapacity to be acted upon, which is not what is meant here.

The privative form is the source of the trouble. It appears to name an absence, and what is being described is a presence: not the removal of the soul’s capacity for movement, but its restoration to its proper object.

The Definition

Evagrius treats apatheia as the term of the practical life and the condition of contemplation: it is the flower of the ascetic struggle, and its arrival is marked by a mind that remains undisturbed by the images of memory and of dreams and that begins to perceive its own light (Evagrius, Praktikos 64, 81; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972). The criterion is telling: it is not the absence of feeling but the absence of disturbance — the passions no longer seize the mind and carry it off.

St. John Climacus devotes Step 29 of the Ladder to dispassion and describes it in terms which have become standard: a heaven of the mind within the heart, and the resurrection of the soul before the resurrection of the body. He immediately qualifies it as a condition in which the soul has acquired the habit of virtue so that the good is done readily and without struggle, and he insists that it is possible in this life while remaining rare (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 29; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982; see St. John Climacus: Dispassion and the Ladder of Virtues).

St. Maximus the Confessor defines it as a peaceful condition of the soul in which it becomes resistant to evil, and makes it the immediate ground of love (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1981; see From Dispassion to Love).

The positive content common to all three: the passible part has been healed, so that desire desires God and the incensive power fights evil, and the person is no longer moved by what used to move him. That is a description of freedom, and it is why the Fathers habitually pair dispassion with the language of liberty.

Five Denials

It is not the extinction of feeling. The saints of this tradition weep, love, grieve, rejoice, and are moved to compassion — copiously and by their own testimony. St. Isaac the Syrian’s account of the merciful heart, which burns for all creation and cannot bear to see any creature suffer, is the summit of the ascetic life as he describes it, and it is a description of a person who feels more rather than less (Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, HTM Homily 71; trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2nd ed., Boston, 2011; = Wensinck Homily 81; see St. Isaac the Syrian: The Merciful Heart). Any account of dispassion that cannot accommodate that passage is wrong.

It is not Stoic insensibility or apathy. English “apathy” descends from the same Greek word and has travelled to mean indifference. Nothing in the patristic use bears that sense. The dispassionate person is not detached from the world’s suffering; the tradition’s uniform testimony is that he is more available to it, precisely because he is no longer preoccupied with himself.

It is not the destruction of the soul’s powers. The desiring and incensive faculties are created goods and remain (see The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin). What is removed is their disorder. St. Maximus is explicit that in those who strive the passions themselves are turned to good use (Maximus, Questions to Thalassius 1; trans. Maximos Constas, FC 136, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018).

It is not sinlessness. This denial matters because the accusation that it means sinlessness is the historical charge against the word (see below). The tradition holds that the freedom to fall remains, that the dispassionate can be assaulted, and that the higher a person stands the further he can fall. The Fathers’ warnings about the vainglory and pride that attack the advanced presuppose exactly this (see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions).

It is not a state a person may claim. No one assesses his own dispassion. This is the same guardrail that governs the whole tradition and is stated in the same terms in the collection on deification (see Theosis: The Dogmatic Guardrails; The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards). Claiming apatheia is one of the classic marks of mnenie.

Degrees, and the Persistence of Freedom

The tradition does not treat dispassion as a single threshold crossed once.

Evagrius distinguishes an imperfect from a perfect dispassion, and later writers speak of degrees: freedom from the grosser passions, then from the subtler; freedom in the waking state, then in dreams; freedom under favourable conditions, then under provocation. Diadochus of Photike and Climacus both work with gradations, and Climacus explicitly says that dispassion admits of more and less (Climacus, Ladder, Step 29; Diadochus of Photike, On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination, in The Philokalia, vol. 1, 1979).

Two consequences. Dispassion is not a plateau but a direction, and progress in it is compatible with continuing struggle. And it is not secured: the possibility of falling is not removed, because the freedom that makes love possible is the same freedom that makes refusal possible. A doctrine of dispassion that guaranteed the outcome would have abolished the person it was supposed to heal.

The Disputed Question: Stoic or Transformed?

Whether Christian apatheia is continuous with the Stoic term or a transformation of it is a genuinely open scholarly question, and this collection reports it without adjudicating (METHODOLOGY §4.2 applies: the standard here is evidential, and the Church has defined nothing on the historical question).

[Disputed: the relation of Christian apatheia to Stoic ἀπάθεια. The continuity reading holds that the term is a direct borrowing from Hellenistic moral philosophy, carried into Christian usage by Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis IV and VI, where the perfect Christian gnostic is described as apathes) and by Origen, and thence to Evagrius; on this reading the Christian use adds a theological frame to a philosophical ideal whose content is substantially Stoic. The transformation reading holds that the content is different because the anthropology is different: the Stoics understood the pathe as false judgments to be eradicated, and dispassion as the sage’s self-sufficiency, whereas the Fathers understand the passible faculties as created goods to be redirected, and dispassion as a gift ordered to love of a personal God — so that the word is the same and the thing is not (see the introduction to Bamberger, The Praktikos, Cistercian Studies 4, 1972; Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The evidence supports both in part: the vocabulary is unmistakably borrowed, and the use to which Evagrius, Maximus, and Isaac put it is not Stoic. Neither reading is the Church’s teaching; what the Church holds is the content set out above, not a thesis about its philosophical genealogy.]

Jerome’s Attack, and Cassian’s Solution

The word was contested in antiquity, and the controversy should be reported rather than passed over.

St. Jerome attacked apatheia as heretical presumption. Writing to Ctesiphon in the polemical climate of the Pelagian controversy (Epistle 133, c. 414–415), Jerome treated the doctrine of impassibility as the philosophical root of the Pelagian claim that a man can be without sin, and named Evagrius of Ibora in Pontus as the author of books on the subject — books, he noted, widely read in the East in Greek and in the West in the Latin translation made by Evagrius’ friend Rufinus. Jerome’s charge was that the doctrine makes a man either a stone or God (Jerome, Epistle 133, to Ctesiphon; trans. NPNF II/6; and cf. his Dialogue against the Pelagians, Prologue; trans. NPNF II/6).

Two honest observations belong here. Jerome’s polemic conflates apatheia with impeccantia, sinlessness — a conflation the Greek ascetic tradition does not make, and modern scholarship generally regards Jerome as having misread Evagrius on the point. And Jerome’s attack was nonetheless not baseless as a pastoral worry: the claim to have arrived at dispassion is exactly the claim the Eastern tradition itself came to treat as a mark of delusion.

St. John Cassian translated around the problem. Writing in Latin for a Western audience in the aftermath of that controversy, Cassian largely avoids the term and substitutes puritas cordis, purity of heart — the immediate goal (scopos) of the monastic life, ordered to the ultimate end (telos) of the Kingdom of God, in the great programmatic first Conference (Cassian, Conferences 1.4–7; trans. Boniface Ramsey, ACW 57, New York: Paulist Press, 1997). Columba Stewart’s study of Cassian argues that the substitution was deliberate and was shaped by the Latin controversy over the Greek word (Stewart, Cassian the Monk, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 4). The result is that the Latin West inherited the substance under a scriptural name — “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8) — while the Greek East kept the philosophical term and had to spend centuries explaining what it did not mean.

For a modern reader the practical upshot is that “purity of heart” is often the safer English gloss for what the Greek texts mean by apatheia, and that a translator’s choice between them is not neutral.

See Also

References

  • Cassian, John. The Conferences, 1.4–7. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
  • Clement of Alexandria. Stromateis, IV and VI. Trans. ANF 2.
  • Diadochus of Photike. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination. In The Philokalia, vol. 1. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
  • Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, 63–64, 81, and Bamberger’s introduction. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.
  • Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, HTM Homily 71 (= Wensinck Homily 81). Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. 2nd ed. Boston, 2011.
  • Jerome. Epistle 133 (to Ctesiphon); Dialogue against the Pelagians, Prologue. Trans. NPNF II/6.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 29. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love. 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.
  • Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Scripture: Matthew 5:8.