Le combat spirituel dans le monde contemporain

“Mortify” or “transfigure”?

Throughout our present colloquy, we have been referring constantly to the passions: but what precisely is meant by this term? It is unfortunate that the English word “passion”, normally used to translate pathos, is all together insufficient to convey the variety of senses present in the Greek term. Linked to the word paschein, “to suffer”, pathos means fundamentally a passive state, as contrasted with dynamis, an active power. It denotes something undergone by a person or object, an event or state that is experienced passively, thus sleep and death are termed pathos by Clement of Alexandria, and saint Gregory of Nazianzus describes the faces of the moon as path?. Applied to our inner life, pathos has thus the sense of a feeling or emotion suffered or undergone by a person.

Two different attitudes towards the passions can already be distinguished in Greek philosophy prior to the patristic period. First there is the view found in early stoicism, whereby pathos signifies a disordered and excessive impulse, horme pleonazousa in Zeno’s definition. It is pathological disturbance of the personality, a disease (morbus), as Cicero puts it. The wise man therefore aims at apatheia, freedom from the passions.
Alongside this unfavourable view of the passions, however, there is also a more optimistic assessment, to be found in Plato and, in a more developed form, in Aristotle. Plato, in the Phaedrus, uses the analogy of the charioteer and the two horses. Here the soul is envisaged as a chariot, with reason (to logistikon) as the charioteer; two horses are yoked to the chariot, the one of noble breed, the other unruly or rebellious, denoting respectively the higher emotions of the “spirited” or “inclusive” part of the soul (to thymikon), and baser emotions of the “appetitive” part (to epithymitikon). Now the two-horse chariot needs horses if it is to move; without the vital energy that path? supply, the soul will lack forcefulness and the power to act. Moreover, if the two-horse chariot is to move in the right direction, it needs not one but both horses; reason, then, can not dispense with either the noble emotions or the baser passions, but it endeavours to keep them under control. So this analogy implies that the wise man should aim, not at the total suppression of the passions in any part of the soul, but at their maintenance in proper balance and harmony.

A similar view is advanced by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. In his opinion the path? include not only such things as desire and anger but also friendship, courage and joy. In themselves the passions are, he says, “neither virtues nor vices”, neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil, and we are neither commanded nor blamed because of them. They are neutral impulses, and everything depends – as metropolitan Filaret of Minsk pointed out in his address – upon the use to which they are put. Our objective, then, is not (as in stoicism) the total elimination of the passions, but rather the mean, to meson, that is to say a moderate and reasonable employment of them. The ideal is not apatheia but metropatheia (this latter term, however, is not actually used by Aristotle himself).

Which of these two understandings of passion is adopted in patristic theology? There is in fact no unanimity among the fathers. In the first place, an important group of writers follows the negative stoic usage. Clement of Alexandria repeats Zeno’s definition of pathos as pleonazousa horme, an “excessive impulse”, “disobedient to reason”, and “contrary to nature”. Passions are “diseases”, and the truly good person has no passions. Nemesius of Emesa likewise follows the stoic view. Evagrius of Pontus associates the passions closely with the demons; the aim of the spiritual combatant is therefore apatheia, but Evagrius gives this a positive content, associating it closely with love. In the Macarian homilies, the passions are almost always understood in a pejorative sense.
Yet in the second place there are fathers who, while basically hostile in their estimate of the passions, yet allow for a positive use of them. Saint Gregory of Nyssa considers that pathos was not originally part of human nature, but “was subsequently introduced into man after the first creation”, and so it does not form part of the definition of the soul. The passions have a character that is “bestial” (ktenodes), rendering us akin to the irrational animals. But, coming closer to the Aristotelian standpoint, Gregory adds that the passions can be put to good use: evil lies, not in the path? as such, but in the free choice (proairesis) of the person making use of them.

Saint John Climacus agrees on the whole with saint Gregory of Nyssa. Sometimes he speaks in negative terms, equating pathos with vice or evil (kakia), and insists that pathos was “not originally part of human nature”: “God is not the creator of the passions”, he says. They belong to human being specifically in their fallen condition, and are to be considered “unholy”. No one should attempt to be a theologian unless he has attained apatheia. But he admits that the passions can be put to good use. The impulse underlying each passion is not in itself evil; it is we who, through our exercise of free choice, that “have taken our natural impulses and turned them into passions”. It is noteworthy that Climacus does not condemn eros, the sexual urge, as intrinsically sinful, but regards it as something that can be directed towards God.

In the third place, however, there are other writers that go yet further than this, and seem to allow that the passions may not only be put to good use, but are also part of our original nature, as created by God. This is particularly the case with abba Isaias (d. c. 491). In his second Logos he takes things that are usually regarded as passions such as desire (epithymia), envy or jealousy (z?los), anger, hatred and pride, and he maintains that they are all of them fundamentally kata physin, “in accordance with nature”, and can all of them be put to good use. Thus the desire that by nature should be directed towards God, we have misdirected towards “all kinds of impurity”. The zeal or jealousy that should lead us to pursue holiness – “strive jealousy for the good gifts”, says saint Paul (1Cor 12:31) – we have corrupted so that it leads us to envy each other. The anger and hatred that should be directed against the devil and all his works, we have misdirected towards our neighbour. Even pride can be put to good use: there is a good self-esteem that enables us to resist destructive self-pity and depression. So, for abba Isaias, such things as anger and pride – which Evagrius would regard as “demons” or as specifically evil thoughts – are on the contrary a natural part of our personhood as created by God. Desire or anger is not in itself sinful; what matters is the way in which it is used, either kata physin or para physin. It is unlikely that Isaias has been directly influenced by Plato or Aristotle, whom probably he had never read, but it may be drawing on the Coptic tradition, as found for example in the letters attributed to saint Antony the Great.

A positive approach to the passions can also be found in later writers. When saint Dionysius the Areopagite describes Hierotheos as “not only learning about but suffering divine things” (ou monon mathon alla kai pathon ta theia), he is surely implying that mystical experience is in some sense a pathos. Saint Maximos the Confessor although tending to endorse saint Gregory of Nyssa’s view that the passions only entered human nature subsequent to the first creation, refers nevertheless (as father Andrew Louth had noted) to “the blessed passion of holy love” (makarion pathos tes theias agapes); and he is not afraid of speak of union with God in erotic terms. The passions, insists, can be “praiseworthy” as well as “reprehensible”. According to saint Gregory Palamas, the aim of the Christian life is not the mortification (nekrosis) of the passions but their transposition or redirection (metathesis).

There is, then, sufficient evidence that the Greek fathers have been influenced not only by the negative stoic approach but also (directly or indirectly) by the more positive Aristotelian assessment. Those fathers who adopt a positive or, at least neutral, view of the passions, are in a minority; but it is a significant minority nonetheless. It could of course be argued that the point at issue is primarily semantic, a question of how we choose to employ the word “passion”. But do not the different usages of the word have much deeper implications? Words possess great symbolic power, and the manner in which they are employed as a decisive influence over the way that we conceive reality. So it is with the word pathos. Are we to follow the negative usage of the stoics, or the open-handed usage of Aristotle? This can have a far-reaching effect on the pastoral counsel that we give to others – and to ourselves. Do we say “mortify” or do we say “transfigured”? Do we say “eradicate” or “educate”? Do we say “eliminate” or “redirect”? There is an enormous difference here.

So far as our spiritual struggle in the contemporary world is concerned, I am firmly convinced that we shall be far more effective if we say “transfigure” rather than “destroy”. The contemporary world in which we dwell is, at any rate in western Europe, a heavily secularized world, alienated from the Church. If we are to win back that world for Christ, if we are ourselves to preserve our Christian identity in this alienated environment, then we shall do well to present our Christian message in affirmative rather than condemnatory terms. We need to light a candle rather than to curse the darkness.