From Dispassion to Love

The constructive file of the section, and the correction of the commonest structural misreading of Orthodox ascetic theology. Apatheia is not the goal; ἀγάπη is. Evagrius calls love the offspring of dispassion; St. Maximus says love is begotten of dispassion; St. John Climacus places dispassion at Step 29 of the Ladder and faith, hope, and love at Step 30. Dispassion is the door, and what is on the other side of it is not tranquillity but a heart that burns for the whole creation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Chain

The ascetic writers habitually present the spiritual life as a sequence of generations — each condition begetting the next — and apatheia always appears in the middle of the chain, never at its end.

Evagrius puts it in a single sentence: love is the offspring of dispassion, and dispassion is the flower of the practical life, which consists in keeping the commandments (Evagrius, Praktikos 81; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972). The Prologue of the same work gives the full chain: faith gives rise to the fear of God, the fear of God to self-control, self-control to patience and hope, these to dispassion, dispassion to love, and love to the knowledge of God (Praktikos, Prologue 8; trans. Bamberger, 1972).

St. Maximus the Confessor gives the chain in reverse, at the head of the Four Hundred Texts on Love: “Love is begotten of dispassion; dispassion of hope in God; hope of patience and long-suffering; these of general self-control; self-control of fear of God; and fear of God of faith in the Lord” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love I.2; in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1981). The text immediately preceding it defines the goal: love is a good disposition of the soul in which it prefers nothing that exists to the knowledge of God (I.1).

Note what the chain does. It makes dispassion instrumental — a condition required for something else, and worthless if the something else does not follow. A person who had achieved the middle of the chain and stopped there would not have achieved a lesser version of the goal; he would have missed it, and the tradition would call his condition by another name.

The Ladder Is Built the Same Way

The structural argument is even clearer in St. John Climacus, because it is built into the shape of his book.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent has thirty steps. Step 29 is dispassion. Step 30 is faith, hope, and love — with love as the summit, the last rung, the thing the whole ascent was for (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 29 and 30; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982; see St. John Climacus: Faith, Hope, Love). Climacus did not append love as a pious coda; he ordered thirty steps so that the reader who has followed the argument arrives at 1 Corinthians 13.

The same ordering appears in the Ladder’s treatment of the summit generally: stillness (27) and prayer (28) precede dispassion (29), and all of them precede love (see St. John Climacus: The Work and Its Structure).

Why the Order Cannot Be Reversed

The reason dispassion has to come first is not that love is a reward for good behaviour. It is that the passions are, precisely, the impediment to love.

Every one of the eight is a mode of being occupied with oneself. Gluttony and unchastity refer the world’s goods to one’s own gratification; avarice secures oneself against the future; anger and rancour defend one’s grievances; dejection mourns one’s losses; vainglory manages one’s reputation; pride refuses one’s dependence. St. Maximus’ identification of philautia, self-love, as the mother of all the passions is exactly this observation, and it explains the sequence: a person full of himself has no room for anyone else, and love is not a feeling he can decide to have (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love II.8, III.8; in The Philokalia, vol. 2; see What a Passion Is).

Dispassion, on this account, is the emptying that makes room. It is not the cause of love in the sense of producing it — love is God’s gift and God is love (1 John 4:8, 16) — but the removal of what prevents it. This is why Maximus can say that dispassion begets love and also that love is what God gives: the ascetic labour clears the ground, and the seed is not the labourer’s.

What the End Actually Looks Like

If dispassion issued in tranquillity, the summit of the ascetic life would be a quiet man. It does not, and the tradition’s own descriptions of the summit are the decisive refutation of every reading of apatheia as insensibility.

St. Isaac the Syrian. Asked what a merciful heart is, he answers: the heart’s burning for the sake of the whole creation — for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, for every created thing — so that the eyes pour out tears at the recollection of them, and the person cannot bear to see or hear of any injury or slight sorrow in any creature, and prays with tears even for the enemies of the truth and for those who harm him, and for the family of reptiles, because of the compassion that burns without measure in his heart in the likeness of God (Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, HTM Homily 71, p. 491; trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2nd ed., Boston, 2011; = Wensinck Homily 81; see St. Isaac the Syrian: The Merciful Heart).

That is what the ascetic literature says a person is like at the end. It is not detachment; it is a nakedness to the world’s suffering that an ordinary person could not survive. And Isaac’s own note on it is that the merciful man does not choose to pity all creatures — he cannot bear to see them suffer, mercy having become his nature.

St. Silouan the Athonite. The modern Athonite tradition gives the same content as a test: the presence of the Holy Spirit in a person is known by love of enemies, and a person who does not love his enemies has not yet received it, whatever else he has (see St. Silouan the Athonite: The Criterion; St. Silouan the Athonite: Prayer for the World). This is the most exacting single criterion in the tradition and the most useful, because it cannot be faked inwardly and cannot be assessed by feeling.

The desert. The same judgment is already in the Apophthegmata, where the great old men are remembered not for their austerities but for their refusal to judge, their willingness to carry another’s fault, and their gentleness — and where the ascetic feats of a monk are set aside as worthless in the face of a failure of charity (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, rev. ed., Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984; see The Desert Fathers: Penthos, Discernment, and Humility).

Three Consequences for Using the Vocabulary

The measure of progress is love of neighbour, not calm. A person who has become more peaceful and less patient with his family has not advanced. The tradition’s criteria are consistently relational and externally visible, and this is deliberate: they are the criteria a person cannot administer to himself favourably.

Ascetic labour that does not produce mercy has gone wrong. This is stated bluntly across the sources, and it is the reason the desert distrusted spectacular austerity. Severity is not evidence of anything; it is compatible with the whole thing having become an exercise in self-regard (see Discernment and the Measure).

Love is not a reward held back until the passions are gone. The commandments are kept from the beginning, and the love of neighbour is commanded of everyone, not merely of the dispassionate. The chain describes a deepening, not a permission. Reading it as a permission produces the characteristic error of the enthusiast who postpones charity until his inner work is further along — and the tradition regards that postponement as itself a passion.

Where This Leads

Dispassion and love are the ascetic tradition’s terms for the human side of a process whose end is God’s gift: deification, the participation of the creature in the uncreated life of God. This collection does not treat that end, which is set out in full elsewhere, and it agrees with the account given there — including the guardrails, which apply here without alteration: the creature remains a creature, the union is God’s gift, and no person may assess his own attainment (see Theosis; Theosis: The Dogmatic Guardrails; Theosis).

What the vocabulary of this collection contributes to that account is the middle of the road: the exact description of what is wrong, what is done about it, and what the doing is for.

References

Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, Prologue 8 and 81. 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, p. 491 (= Wensinck Homily 81). Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. 2nd ed. Boston, 2011.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 29 and 30. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love, I.1–2, II.8, III.8. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1991.
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13; 1 John 4:8, 16.