The Passions

The English word "passion" now means strong feeling, but the Greek pathos means something undergone — something done to the soul, a sickness it suffers rather than a mood it enjoys. In the Fathers, a passion is a good God-given power gone wrong: the desire meant to reach for God fastened instead on food or flesh; the anger meant to resist evil turned against a neighbor. So the passions are not the emotions themselves, and not merely sins one chooses, but the settled, disordered drives underneath the sins — grooves worn so deep that the will slides down them almost without consent.

This is why Orthodox writers speak of the passions as illnesses and of Christ as the physician. The point of naming them is not to heap up guilt but to diagnose, the way a doctor names a disease in order to treat it. A passion left unexamined runs the person; a passion recognized can be brought to healing.

The tradition inherited a working list. In the fourth century Evagrius of Pontus, a monk of the Egyptian desert, identified eight tempting thoughts (logismoi) that assault the soul; his heir St. John Cassian carried the scheme west and set it down in Latin. Cassian names them in order: "first, Gluttony or the pleasures of the palate; secondly, Fornication; thirdly, Covetousness, which means Avarice, or, as it may more properly be called, the love of money, fourthly, Anger; fifthly, Dejection; sixthly, Accidie, which is heaviness or weariness of heart; seventhly, κενοδοξία which means foolish or vain glory; eighthly, pride."

The order is not accidental. The list runs roughly from the bodily passions to the most spiritual, and the Fathers observed that each can breed the next, while the last two — vainglory and pride — are the subtlest of all, ambushing precisely the person who has conquered the others and begun to admire himself for it. (The Christian West later reworked this same scheme into the familiar "seven deadly sins.") No list is meant as a cage; it is a map of the usual battlefields, so that a Christian fighting one temptation can recognize where he stands and what tends to come next.

The passions are not defeated by white-knuckled suppression, which only drives them underground. They are healed — displaced by their opposite virtues, as generosity unseats avarice and love unseats anger — through watchfulness over the incoming thoughts, through prayer (above all the Jesus Prayer), through the Holy Mysteries, and through the training of asceticism and fasting. It is real spiritual warfare, but the aim is not a numb, feelingless soul.

The goal has a name: dispassion (apatheia), which does not mean the absence of feeling but freedom from the tyranny of disordered feeling — a heart so healed that its energies, no longer captured by the passions, are set free for their true purpose, which is love. "Out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts" (Mark 7:21), Christ said; the whole ascetic tradition is the long work of getting the heart clean, so that out of it might proceed something else.