“We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess…” This observation, made over twenty years ago by David Bentley Hart in his popular 2003 essay “Christ and Nothing,” set up a claim that belief in the absoluteness of the will entails nihilism. This is because every external good must be disbelieved so that it does not exercise any constraint upon the will. In order for everything to be personally chosen, everything must be relativized and subjectivized.
Since that essay appeared, it has become only more apparent how nihilistic libertarianism is. It has plunged Western culture into profound acedia, addiction, loneliness, and irrationality. Individualism has not ushered in a utopia. It has not made mankind more peaceable. It has enflamed the passions of the soul. It has set loose the dragons that lurk in the hidden caverns of the human heart. Now, people are enslaved to their desires and have accordingly become more and more agitated and unsatisfied.
The only antidote to rapacious desire is asceticism. But just here we face a problem. The modern Church has tended to focus its engagement with the contemporary world on catechesis. On the one hand, the intellectual challenges of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries have pressured the Church to answer intellectual objections. On the other, the Second Vatican Council called for the Church to re-propose the Catholic faith in modern terms. So much emphasis has been placed on the intellectual dimension of faith.
While it is true that there is great theological illiteracy in our day, even among the faithful, it is also the case that truth won’t gain traction in the mind when the will is out-of-control. If we are to combat the nihilistic hedonism of our day, we need to recover the ancient regimen of asceticism.
It is, then, with great excitement that I picked up Rowan Williams’ latest book, Passions of the Soul. The book is a publication of retreat addresses given in 2018 to Holy Cross Convent, an Anglican Benedictine community in Leicestershire. If you know anything about the former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, you know that he has a fondness for the Eastern tradition. He thinks Christian doctrine in spiritual terms, understanding how doctrine shapes personal psychology and society. Williams also has a talent for re-proposing and refreshing ancient ideas to a modern, skeptical audience.
Quite rightly, Williams begins this book trying to help his readers reconnect with the monastic notion of “apathy.” He is quick to make sure the concept isn’t misunderstood. It is not numbness to the external world. It is not a matter of ignoring or suppressing pain, sorrow, or suffering. Apathy, in short, isn’t denial of reality.
Apathy is more precisely a quality of the soul that is not under compulsion or subject to impulse. In Williams’ terms, it is the state of the soul that has overcome that fundamental insecurity which lies at the foundation of every human heart. Apathy is what characterizes the soul that rests secure in God and therefore is not seduced by every created thing that poses as a substitute for God.
Williams goes on to say that apathy is best understood as “freedom from passion,” “an anticipation of the resurrection” and simply “life under the influence of the Holy Spirit.”
Passion should be understood not as excitement or bare desire, but as a kind of spiritual unrest or agitation that exaggerates and misdirects natural desires. Passion is what we live by when we try to neglect or reject out dependency upon God. Passion is the illusion that we can overcome this dependency by amassing bodily pleasures, social status, or material gain.
After this basic orientation to apathy and passion, the book divides into two parts. The first examines the eight expressions of passion identified by Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century monk. These are: (1) gluttony; (2) lust; (3) avarice; (4) wrath; (5) despair; (6) acedia; (7) envy; and (8) pride.
Williams contrasts the life of passion with the life of beatitude outlined by Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount recorded in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. To summarize his schema: pride is overcome by poverty of spirit, acedia by mourning, wrath by meekness, gluttony by a hunger for justice, avarice by being merciful, lust by purity of heart, envy by peacemaking, and despair by being persecuted for righteousness’ sake. By way of summary, if the passions cause a person to attach to reality selfishly, the beatitudes prompt a person to accept reality as a gift, as something that should be received not controlled or pressed into service of the self.
The second part of the book consists of two essays that were not part of the original retreat conferences. They were published in two edited volumes on Christian spirituality. They are much more theologically explicit than the those from the first part which tend to be more generic in their language. The first essay seeks to show that Christ is the exemplar of beatitude because He is the embodiment of sonship to the Father. Jesus’ human life is but the translation into human history of His eternal relationship to the Father through the Holy Spirit. Consequently, when human passion is transformed into beatitude, the Christian life takes the form of nuptial union with God.
The final essay looks at how early Christian reflection on the passions was socially revolutionary. A major theme is that because early monastic reflection on the passions tended to be skeptical of the human tendency to control, it tended to produce societies that were more based on mutuality and self-offering than hierarchical authority.
Passions of the Soul is best understood as an exercise in re-thinking the core concepts of the Eastern monastic tradition to make them more accessible or relatable to modern people. As one can expect from Williams, there are insights that reward reflection. Casting apathy as an anticipation of the resurrection, for example, helps us to see that it is not bodily desires as such that are the problem but our spiritual understanding of these bodily desires. Likewise, it helps us see that apathy is about joy and freedom, not sorrow and suppression.
As with his other works, Williams makes the rhetorical choice to deploy a more generic conceptuality and relegate the Church’s theological language to a secondary, often illustrative role. For example, Williams seems to prefer speaking about egoism to sin or “openness to reality” or “self-awareness” to virtue, holiness, and devotion.
This has the benefit of making ancient notions seem more contemporary to the modern ear. And it does shift the drama of Christianity from God’s historic, supernatural intervention to the drama of personal breakthrough or social revolution. But I fear much is lost, and Williams’ descriptions often seem at once redundant and rather reductionistic.
On the one hand, his treatment of the passions and the beatitudes becomes at times so vague as to be vacuous. The concrete difference between each of the passions is lost as each passion is reduced to some form of rejecting dependency upon God. Each of the eight passions are often defined in ways that are indistinguishable from each other. Pride, for example, is defined by Williams as “a failure to accept dependence gratefully and gracefully” while avarice is described as “a longing for control – control over others, control over one’s circumstances…control over one’s image.”
Perhaps true in a very basic way, lost is the sense of the peculiarity of pride and avarice. Pride is not merely a rejection of dependency, but more specifically a desire, however tacit, to usurp God and determine for oneself one’s own destiny and morality. Avarice is not merely a desire for control, but an obsession with money and things. Too often it seems that the passions were hollowed out to the point of being little more than selfishness.
Likewise, the beatitudes are given rather creative yet ambiguous definitions. I confess to being profoundly disappointed when “purity of heart,” for example, was rendered as “a desire not to stop desiring, a desire to be kept open to truth and loveliness, wherever it may be.”
I can’t help but think that these descriptions fall rather short of the kind of analysis one finds in Evagrius or John Cassian. Furthermore, it seems to me that their confidence in the peculiar language of Scripture and Tradition that enables them to probe more deeply both into the human heart and into the divine mystery. Williams’ more generic, psychological language may have the advantage of making the Eastern tradition more relatable, but it is significantly less robust and precise.
This brings me to the second way in which Williams’ analysis is stifled. Because he tends to shy away from classical theological conceptuality in favor of a more secular or neutral vocabulary, his rendering of the theological dimensions of human action is either too ambiguous or, at times, theologically deficient.
Nowhere is this better seen than in his definition of sin: “Sin costs us; it costs us our human naturalness; it freezes up our liberty to say yes to what we are most deeply, naturally, oriented to.” This is fine as far as it goes, I suppose. But by not going far enough, it makes “sin” synonymous with “failure.” By contrast, in the Christian tradition, sin is not merely a failure to be fully human, but a failure to do justice to God. Sin doesn’t just put us at odds with ourselves, but at odds with God. Williams would not deny this, I don’t think. But he does seem to retreat from discussing the theological significance of sin in favor of appealing to modern individualism.
Alongside this, there does seem to be a general neglect in this book of the way in which passion itself is caused by alienation from God. In other words, our passions are enflamed precisely because we are attempting to find something to fill the void left by the departure of God’s presence from the soul on account of original sin. Passion moves us to substitute for God the things of this world. Williams hesitance with theological language leaves this aspect underdetermined and thereby risks leaving the reader with the impression that the passions are something of a consequence of human finitude rather than human fallenness.
This little book is timely as our culture could use a rediscovery of ancient asceticism and apathy. Readers entirely unfamiliar with this tradition can profit from Williams’ analysis, keeping in mind the issues just noted. But those looking to go deeper into the passions of the soul and their practical remedy would do better simply reading John Cassian’s Institutes.
Passions of the Soul
By Rowan Williams,
Bloomsbury, 2024
Paperback, 160 pages
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Said Norfolk to the frightened Thomas More at the time of Henry VIII: “This isn’t Spain, you know.”
Compared to the English and Anglican Rowan Williams, and his “contrast of passion with beatitude,” how does the Spaniard and Catholic Miguel de Unamuno understand, say, the suffering “‘passion’ of Christ?”
His somewhat different opinion about passion:
“What then is PASSION? I do not know, or rather, I know full well, because I feel it, and since I feel it there is no need for me to define it to myself. Nay, more; I fear that if I were to arrive at a definition of it, I should cease to feel it and to possess it. Passion is like suffering [!], and like suffering it creates its object. It is easier for the fire to find something to burn than for something combustible to find the fire.”
INSTEAD of dissipating yet more library pages on easy-target “individualism”, he asserts and affirms: “… we Spaniards feel this very strongly, that the individual is the end of the Universe [….] And the famous maladie du seicle [individualism?], which announced itself in Rousseau […] neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe.”
About the BEATITUDES, “To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine there should be sometimes added yet another, that of awakening the sleeper […] surely when the sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice [….]” Of the real “individual”—the still-faithful and eternal human soul—Unamuno asks, “What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, to-day, in this world? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness” (“The Tragic Sense of Life,” 1921).
Thank you for an excellent review, Dr Merrick. The richness of thought you found in the book was obviously offset by the vagueness in terms, but even in describing your reasons, you managed to not only educate but to inspire the reader to consider diving into Evagrius or John Cassian. It has been precisely the reduction of faith to a human fulfillment project that has been most exasperating in recent decades, and the reason why I decamped from the Novus Ordo to the Vetus Ordo, which puts far more emphasis on the need to repent and cling to the narrow path, with a vocabulary to aid in that process.
Thank you for your kind comment, Genevieve. I do think that reducing faith to human fulfillment is problematic, and likewise I attend a ICKSP parish. While I can appreciate that in times past, the human, experiential, and historical dimensions of divine Revelation were underdeveloped or neglected, I don’t think the solution is to talk as though faith/religion is self-improvement or self-fulfillment