Review: Passions of the soul
This review appeared in Sofia magazine issue 153, ‘Looking Back, Facing Forward’.
Passions of the soul, by Rowan Williams, Bloomsbury (London 2024) Pbk.121 pages.
Passions of the soul is a collection of addresses and essays from Rowan Williams describing early Eastern Christian mystic thinking about the human ‘passions’ – the origin of what are commonly called the 7 deadly sins. Williams proposes that the Beatitudes of Jesus offer a ‘counter-proposal’ mode of living to respond to the passions.
Williams introduces the book as ‘non-scholarly’, though the introduction was dated ‘Michaelmas 2022’, using the esoteric Oxford calendar. I’m not a scholar and I had to read this book without distraction and often multiple times. I suppose I was forced into a monastic experience of reading.
While books on spirituality proliferate today, early Christians would not recognise the modern ‘self-indulgent quest for gratifying experiences’ notes the opening. And vice-versa, the book must explain to modern readers what the early Christians meant by words like Passion and Apathy.
‘Passions’ are the whole realm of instincts, reactions and desires, including survival mechanisms like thirst and hunger. ‘Apathy’ meant freedom from excessive control of the passions to grow in ‘wakefulness’. ‘You can’t abolish these passions, but come to terms with them … so as to not live at the level of reaction all the time.’
This reminded me of the popular airport book, ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman, which divides human thinking into fast, instinctive and emotional decisions in our primitive lizard brain, and slower, deliberative and logical thinking in our more recently evolved brain.
Pre-Christian thought described two ‘bundles’ of instincts: aggression to defend against the world and desire to consume the world for our own agenda. The first keeps reality out, the second draws it in and controls it. True freedom for the mystics was to reach a balance where you see reality without either defensive panic or greed. Early Christians grouped these instincts into the 3 demons of ascetic life and the 8 habits of the soul, which became the 7 deadly sins.
Williams has a great passage describing the operation of the passions. Starting with the ‘first flicker’ of awareness interrupting our thoughts, this is ‘given house room’ and explored in growing detail until we are finally seized by it and driven to enact it, losing our freedom like an addict.
The advice from the ‘desert writers’ is to acknowledge the impulse, without obsessing, and then ‘give it to God’ and move on; Go do the washing up and take out the rubbish. Modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) gives the same advice, though rather than pray you might write in your journal.
At our July conference, I was struck by a conversation between John Holroyd and Linda Woodhead about the mental health crisis facing young people today. Linda talked about how many young people seemed caught in these spirals of paralysing thought, unable to step outside it.
The mystics offer advice on ‘corrupt chains of thought’, what we would call intrusive thoughts or spiralling anxiety. This advice includes talking, not as in therapy, but to see ourselves with some detachment and perspective. This takes us out of the private world in which we are the star of a heroic drama, or just as dangerously where we pick over our failures with disgust.
Science tells us that evolution made our passions the way they are. The Christian mystics map the passions back onto the creation, ‘We are because God is. And we are what we are because God is what God is.’ Williams emphasises, ‘This is not a blind New-Age-ish message of self-acceptance … God embraces and loves us as we are, but the presence of God in the neighbourhood of ourselves cannot be affect what we are.’
The New Age could respond similarly: Genuine self-acceptance requires introspection that inevitably leads to moral improvement. A secular perspective could be that as intelligent animals, it’s up to us to decide when to embrace our nature and when to escape it.
Whatever approach we take, we are pre-supposing some ethic by which we judge what is godly, healthy or good. That ethic may well be another part of our nature, but is at the least more than merely our base unexamined instincts.