Pooh and the Passions: a Theological Speculation

I was reading St. Gregory Palamas, as one does. He’s a 14th century saint famous for teaching a distinction between the energies and essence of God. It’s an abstruse topic that is used in Catholic/Orthodox polemics. I think it’s mostly a difference between how the word “essence” is understood, but lots of people get worked up over it.

The reason he makes the distinction is to argue that the Christian really does experience God, in this life, in a real way that is not merely symbolic or intellectual grasping of an elevated concept. St. Gregory asserts that the energies (the glory of God as seen by the saint) is really God, even though not the essence of God, which no-one can see. He’s attempting to defend an incarnational model of prayer that is real, actual, and leads to contact.

His opponent in this debate was a monk named Barlaam who seems to have been scandalized by the earthly nature of the Eastern monks, who are quite conscious that they have bodies. How could the body, thinks the philosopher, be elevated to the divine? Isn’t it where passions reside? St. Gregory argues that the body is in fact strongly united to the soul. He’s almost Aristotelian in this! “But what pain or pleasure or movement is not a common activity of both body and soul?” The soul and body are one thing, and if the soul is to be elevated to God, so is the body. “Such spiritual activities. . . descend into the body from the mind, in order to transform the body into something better and to deify it by these actions and passions.”

This might seem odd for an Orthodox bishop to teach, coming from a Church that has four fasting seasons throughout the year. How could the passions be good? Shouldn’t we, in fact, be getting rid of the passions? Allow me to quote at length:

Impassibility does not consist in mortifying the passionate part of the soul, but in removing it from evil to good, and directing its energies towards divine things. . . and the impassible man is one who no longer possesses any evil dispositions, but is rich in good ones, who is marked by the virtues, as men of passion are marked by evil pleasures; who has tamed his irascible and concupiscent appetites (which constitute the passionate part of the soul), to the faculties of knowledge, judgment, and reason in the soul, just as men of passion subject their reason to the passions. For it is the misuse of the powers of the soul which engenders the terrible passions, just as misuse of the knowledge of created things engenders the ‘wisdom which has become folly’.

I have been reading lots of biology and biochemistry, as you know if you’ve been following along. The passions of the medieval theologian are the dopamine, seratonin, and leptin of today. These chemicals promote certain activities. We experience passions to do things. Take, for example, the desire for sweets. We love sweet tasting things and prefer it to everything else. It gives us a big dopamine hit and makes us feel ‘happy’. The down-regulation of satiety encourages us to eat more, not just of sweets but of everything else. Isn’t this a disordered passion? An argument against the goodness of the body?

No! In fact the preference for sweets is a good thing when you are eating seasonally. In the fall, the fruit is ripe. You go eat as much of it as you can, because it won’t keep. This promotes eating lots of food allowing you to put on fat to make it through the winter. It’s a good and healthy passion, as Winnie the Pooh knows, only not so much in an era of sugar abundance. What went wrong? The desire is itself good. It has become bad because of the action of the intellect choosing the desire (for sweets) over the good of a healthy life. Thus we have the East India Company, sugar cane plantations, slavery, globalism, and all the ills that come with them because we tried to feed the passion rather than live according to nature.

The passions are good in their proper context. Much of civilization removes that context. Take, for example, the modern delay of marriage until one is 30 or older–is it any wonder that the sexual passion gets out of control?

Sometimes, when I am theologizing carelessly, I think about the connection of original sin and agriculture and the culture of abundance. The first murderer, after all, was a farmer!