By Alex Fogleman
Review of Rowan Williams, Passion of the Soul (Bloomsbury, 2024)
If the catechist’s task isn’t merely to dispense information on high but to pass on the faith to particular persons in particular times and places, then we must have some facility in helping catechumens discern matters of the soul. The catechist, on this score, is part theologian, part spiritual director. This demand becomes more obvious at certain moments—teaching what it means to pray that we be not “led into temptation,” for example. But I’d wager that it’s true of catechesis as a whole.
For cultivating such discernment, there are few better guides than the ancient monastic theologians like Evagrius of Pontus and John Cassian. Their writings provide a spiritual map of the soul, outlining the various “passions” that perturb, trouble, and in so many ways move the soul in more chaotic directions. By passion, or pathos, the monks don’t mean what we often mean today—having a “passion” for a job or hobby or whatever. The monks diagnosed the pathoi of the soul the way a medical doctor today inspects an strange growth or a tumor. And, also like the medical doctor, the goal was healing: to help the Christian become “passionless,” without pathos. The technical term for this is apatheia.
Today, though, when we hear words like “passion” or “apatheia,” we think the opposite of what the monks mean: for us, passion = good; apathy = bad. We want the energy, dynamism, and verve of passion, and nothing to do with listless, dull, stupefying apathy. We’re not exactly well-disposed to hear the monks on this score. Worse: we remain unreceptive to the kind of wisdom and healing they have to offer.
Rowan Williams’s recent book, Passions of the Soul, does a tremendous job helping us understand the spiritual-scriptural logic of the monastic passions and apathy. And he does so in an unexpected way: through pairing each of the eight monastic “passions” with one of the eight beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. I can’t do justice to the spiritual depth hidden in this little book, but it may be of use to tease out some of the connections he makes.
Before going through each of the passions, Williams provides a basic orientation in monastic spirituality, especially alerting us to the themes of wakefulness, contemplation (the activity of nous), passion (pathos), and apatheia. One of the central points here is that all of the monastic language about becoming free of the passions, which can sound to modern ears like an un-Christian rejection of the body, is actually about seeing and living truthfully and lovingly. To be free from anger, lust, greed, envy, and the rest is “to find the balancing point of truthfulness where you can look at what is actually there int eh world, and indeed in God, without either greed or defensive panic” (xxxi). This is the kind of “passion-free” love that characterizes God’s own life. And at the heart of this book is call to learn to live as creatures of the uncreated God of love. The underlying anthropological refrain of the book is deceptively simply: “we are what we are because God is what God is” (xxxii, emphasis original). “We are because God is.”
After an initial mapping of the theological and spiritual landscape of monastic writing, a series of short reflections on each of the passion-beatitude couplings follows.
1. Pride => Poverty in Spirit. If pride is, at its most basic, a refusal “to accept dependence gratefully and gracefully” (23), then seeking poverty of spirit is to live into the dependence of creatureliness that recognizes that we are because God is. The poor in spirit are aware that everything about their existence—down to their very breath (pneuma = spirit/breath/air)—is possible only because of the infinite goodness and love of God. We unlearn pride through the poverty of spirit that turns away from the refusal to admit dependence.
2. Acedia => Mourning. Acedia is the noon-day demon of desert spirituality, the listless, bored, hardening of heart that is distressed, distracted, and utterly exhausted. (The traditional translation of “lazy” misses almost entirely the spiritual turmoil at work in this particularly pathos.) By pairing this passion with mourning, Williams shows how we might lean in, rather than away, from the sufferings and hurts of others—resisting the “anesthesia of the spirit” that resists the hurts and pain of others (29). “The opposite of listlessness—the opposite of all those restless coping mechanisms, those various ways of wriggling out of boredom and frustrated self-esteem, shifting our gaze away from pain in myself or the world—is the freedom to mourn” (30). We unlearn acedia through embracing the kind of mourning that turns away from the refusal to admit vulnerability.
Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury
3. Anger => Meekness. Unlike some of the other passions, anger can be turned to good as well as evil. It can be a powerful aid to seeking justice and to resisting spiritual laziness. But if not turned against our own destructiveness or the destructiveness of others, as many of us know all too well, it simply destroys us. Williams pairs this with the beatitude of “meekness,” and gives it a deliberately Christological meaning. The word “meek” (Greek paus) does not mean a diffident cowardice in the face of challenge. Jesus says, “Come to me for I am gentle and humble (paus) in heart.” Williams thus suggests that we understand the virtue of meekness as a willingness to be open to one’s neighbor, to resist pushing away the other and be attentive to their needs and vulnerability. If anger is a seething rejection of the other in order to maintain control of one’s own self-possessed being, meekness is a “a habit of calm attentiveness, stillness, freedom from the fretting worry of keeping control, a stillness that allows others to feel welcome around you” (38).
4. Gluttony => Hungering and Thirsting for Righteousness. Gluttony is another way of rejecting our creaturely dependence, a refusal to be what we are because of what God is. This happens for the monk not only in excessive eating or drinking but even in the apparent opposite: of undertaking extremes acts of asceticism who thus sets up a fantasy that they can live without dependence on God. Either is a refusal of creatureliness, a rejection of the fundamental relatedness in the world that leads us into division with others and with all of creation. Williams pairs this with hungering and thirsting for righteousness, not simply as a play on the metaphor of food and hunger but more fundamentally about this way of understanding our relatedness to the created world. “What we need in order to live in a balanced, ‘reasonable’ way within creation is the well-being and flourishing of our neighbors, justice being done to and for them” (44). Our failure to give bread to the needy is both a physical impoverishment over a neighbor and also a famine of our own souls. “Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question” (44).
Fresco at the Monastery of St. Nicholas Anapausas (Meteora, Greece; ca. 1527)
5. Avarice => Mercy. Like gluttony, avarice is a loss of touch with our basic createdness. The acquisitive spirit of avarice is both a longing for “control”—control over others, over how we’re perceived—and a “failure to trust the providence of God” (48). In this passion is a way of avoiding living in the mercy of God. Mercy is risky: “if life is always what we are given, not something we own, then the refusal to give life to another by seeking reconciliation and renewal of relationship is not only depriving someone else; it is also shutting out a channel by which life may come to me” (50). The risk of mercy is the risk of letting go of control over our own lives and the need to define who and what we are and also who and what others are. And just for that reason, mercy is the risk of coming under the mercy of God.
6. Lust => Purity of Heart. Desire is fundamental to human life: from the baby’s first cry to our final union with God. But desire also takes various twists and turns throughout life. Sexual desire, according to the monks, is a God-given impulse, intended for the purposes of procreation. Sexual desire, as a species of desire as whole, goes awry most fundamentally when it becomes a way to reduce others to a means of my own gratification and fulfillment. The solution to malformed desires—especially in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, to whom Williams turns in this section—is not the eradication of desires but their alighting upon God. The goodness of desire is its facilitation of an ever-expanding capacity for finite creatures to embrace the infinite God. Desire turns sour when we refuse the infinitude of desire and have it close down on a particular object, whether a person, status, possession, relationship, or anything else. In this regard, the purity of heart that sees God might be understood then as a “lasting and single-minded longing to keep open to the truth, to keep open to the love and the reality that are God, recognizing that this longing can never be satisfied, over and done with” (60). This is a desire that never ceases desiring.
7. Envy => Peacemaking. Like other passions, envy is driven by fear of lack and the refusal of dependence. It operates in a zero-sum game wherein giving to another demands the impoverishment of another. If you have something I want—not only material goods, again, but also things like attention or the admiration others—there’s not enough to go around. There’s an economy of scarcity. But God, Williams reminds us, “does not play that particular game” (67). “In the economy of the Body of Christ, this becomes the ruling reality: every sign of love and grace bestowed on any person int eh Church is given for the sake of all” (67). This passion is connected with the peacemaking children of God because the children of God live in full awareness of the abundance of God. They live as if God is God and we are creatures of a good and loving Father. “To make peace, to create space for God’s harmonizing, peacemaking purpose to overflow in us in the giving and receiving of gifts, is what happens when we stop worrying whether someone is getting more of the cake than we are” (68). In resisting the passion of envy, we make space for God’s peace to dwell among us.
8. Despair => Suffering for the Kingdom In some monastic lists, despair comes last on the list. Despair is the ultimate refusal of hope, “the absence of a sense of the possible or the promising” (70). It is a recognition of a sins and failures without any sense of God’s perspective on the matter. It is to give ourselves, rather than God, the last word about who and what we are. The willingness to endure persecution, to suffer for righteousness’ sake, is the refusal of despair and the embrace of hope. The martyr confesses that it is not our word but God’s word that has the final say on the shape of things. There is no worldly security, no guarantee of safety. But it is the only way to live in the world when one is free from the passions and has embraced the radical Christocentric path of apatheia. It is to live in light of the resurrection. As Williams puts it,
The light of the resurrection is not only what allows us to see ourselves a bit more clearly…. It is what allows us to see the entire landscape of God’s creating activity in the radiance of Christ’s presence in the Spirit. This landscape is, by God’s grace, show to us as our homeland; it is where we belong. And this is what the life of apatheia, the life of freedom from the tyranny of ‘passion’, is finally about; living in the joyful and grateful awareness of God’s perspective on the creation God loves and transfigures; praying and labouring day by day for that inch-by-inch growth in clarity, freedom, charity; growing in the right kind of detachment that lets us see our muddled lives embraced and healed in Jesus, the author and the pioneer of our faithfulness” (76).
Transfiguration Icon (15th Century)
Williams concludes with an account of how we should understand Christian spirituality as an aspect of Christological reflection. Williams speaks of Jesus Christ as the human “place” in which the convergence of the divine Logos and created human nature comes into alignment, looking especially at the distinct but related theological traditions of Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa. They both stem from a disciplined biblical reflection on how the human creature of Jesus of Nazareth is the “site” of perfect harmony with the divine nature while rejecting any kind of competitive understanding between divinity and humanity. Yet in these writers we see two kinds of pathways of discipleship—Origen’s emphasizing a path from darkness to clarity as all obstacles to contemplation are removed; Gregory’s leaning into the ever-expansive desire into the infinite life of God that can be describe as an entrance into the cloud of unknowing.
This reflection on Christ as the “place” of divine encounter lends into reflection on broader themes in Christian spirituality, especially in the writings about the early Christian martyrs on into the Carmelite tradition of John and Teresa. Running throughout is an emphasis on the personal, particular, embodied, and ecclesial nature of Christian spirituality. The language of Christian theology, and especially classical Christian doctrines of God’s apatheia, are meant to help us not shut down the life of the Spirit but to keep in place a set of guides that can illuminate the path by which we are drawn ever up and ever into the divine light of Christ—the light of pure, passion-free love, the homeland of apatheia.