Rowan Williams on Apatheia and the Passions

 https://mucknellabbey.org.uk/apatheia-and-the-passions-talks-by-rowan-williams/

The diabolical way of seeing the world is as a supermarket: I'll have that, I'll have that, I'll have that. No matter what a thing *is*, what can it do for me?

We constantly slip into the acquisitive mode and shove stuff in the bag of the ego.

We are made to contemplate and share the glory of God. But we need to learn to be spiritually intelligent about our instincts so that we aren't just reactive but can understand something of what is happening in us when we are hit by change and chance. By habit we are imprisoned by self-defence and various ways of coping.

We fall away from the heart of true generous overflowing sharing of love either by (1) aggressively pushing reality away in anger and fear (associated with the chest) or (2) lust, desire or greed (associated with the belly and below) which tries to grab at or use reality, to take it to ourselves selfishly.

We should not panic when we are tempted. We should honestly register impulses and inclinations and give them to God and go and do something else. But there is a danger of self-indulgence in which registering shifts to corrupt chains of thinking which can trap us in a fugue, an obsessive fantasy of welcoming, entertaining, exploration, imagination and consent. We can be endlessly fascinating to ourselves. We want to be interesting but we are loved.

Sin PLAGUES us - the 7 deadly sins: Pride, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Usury, Envy, Sloth

The passions as corruptions of natural instincts. 

We can never settle down and stay the same in the Christian life. We either grow or shrink. 

We need to learn to see ourselves with truth and clarity and without fear or disgust, as God does. He sees our sin and does not turn away but embraces us in his love and transforms us by his grace. 

The 8 passions of the soul might be considered alongside the Beatitudes. 

(1) Pride / poverty of spirit, knowing our need of God

Pride normally has pride of place in discussion of the passions. 

Pride is a failure to accept our dependence gratefully and graciously. We are because God is.

Pride is trying to hold your breath until you burst: it is a refusal to let God in. 

Pride mistakes God for a rival, but God is already our life. We do not need to put ourselves down but to see ourselves as in God, in the Spirit. 

The devil is both very clever and very stupid. 

(2) Acedia / the sorrowful who mourn will find comfort and consolation 

Acedia, listlessness, apathy, boredom, exhaustion, the wrong kind of detachment, shrugging off, hardening, self-disgust and impatience, dreariness - the noon day demon 

Ordinary grown up human life is sometimes dull 

The ego and its fantasies / business may try to fill the void of our poverty - nostalgia or wistfulness

We mourn / are sorrowful because we care - compassion. We should acknowledge the hurts / pain / grief. There is no point in pretending there is no hurt. This would be unreal, dishonest. We must be free to mourn. Vulnerability. 

A surface of cynicism can get us through - "whatever!"

The worst thing that can happen to us is a kind of anaesthesia of the spirit. If we forget God, we may become insensitive. 

In the Psalms, Christ laments and as his body we join with him in lamenting.

(3) Anger / meekness

Righteous anger is right, but its also a terribly tempting alibi. It can so easily be self-righteous.

Anger can blind us, and we can be blinded as much by gold as by lead. We must keep an eye on anger!

Whom does your anger serve? Does it make you feel better or does it change anything?

Jesus is not weak, or ineffectual. His meekness includes an openness to others, a sharing of vulnerability, welcoming. (Matthew 11:29) 

Anger in a person of calm, inner stillness. Not tension or tenseness or fretting worry / control. No chest-beating or pushing away. No need to battle or throw up defences. 

(4) Gluttony / hungering and thirsting for righteousness / justice 

Some lists put this first. 

Adam fell because of the sin of gluttony. He was not hungry. He took what he did not need. 

Origen compares Adam's gluttony and Christ's fasting. 

Fussiness or excessive asceticism can be species of gluttony. 

Ezekiel 16.

Gluttony a kind of unrealism - not recognising what I really need to be me. A rejection of our createdness and proper relation to God and the rest of creation. 

We must seek not only our own well-being but the well-being of our neighbours and creation. Bread for ourselves is a material issue; bread for our neighbour is a spiritual issue. 

(5) Avarice / mercy

Distinguish from ordinary greed. The longing for control over others, circumstances, one's image. A failure to trust the providence of God - fear of others, of the future. Lack of trust which leads to ingenious effort to avoid risk. Desire not to be at the mercy of others. 

Keeping myself safe might block me off from life. 

Not standing on my rights / debts. The risky open-handedness of the Kingdom. 

(6) Lust /  purity 

cf. natural desire and distorted desire.

The demand for my satisfaction corrupts and compromises. Short term and selfish. 

LXX Daniel, man of desires, a misreading of the Hebrew. Positive desires for God. Gregory of Nyssa - desire must never leave us, it must continue and grow. We go wrong when we desire not to desire any more but to be satisfied. Human nature should constantly be open to new depths. We will always want to know and love the infinite God more. Heaven is sinking into the ocean of God who has no floor. 

Growth, not just plugging gaps. Augustine, Confessions Book 4, on the death of his best friend. Treating the friend as an adjunct to himself, for his own happiness. He had failed to love a human being in a human way. Others do not simply serve us: they must be allowed their own identity.  

Purity of heart is to go on single-mindedly longing for one thing - reality, God! 

C S Lewis - joy, yearning, a deep desire. The Last Battle - further up, further in, more solid, real, beautiful 

(7) Envy / peacemaking (Shalom, shared well-being) 

In the East an overlap with self-esteem. (cf. Pride) Anxiety about being deprived. The world as a zero sum game of them or me. There's only so much love and admiration around, so I must make sure I get some! 

cf. The Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard. God's prodigal love for the undeserving.

Election and blessing of one for the sake of others.   

(8) Despair - dejection / persecuted - suffering for justice / the Kingdom

Peter repents and Judas despairs. 

Despair: the absence of hope, promise. Despair as deadening and deadly. Looking at our sin only from our point of view. But our point of view and the point of view of the world are not the last word - they are not all there is to see. Faithful witness looks to God's point of view, answerable to him. The martyrs give us hope in the face of despair. 

The reward is God himself. We need to see ourselves in the light of God, in the hand of God, created and remade by him. Our acknowledgement of our poverty is our richness and security, our pathway to joy. 

Jesus' passionate, emotional humanity was fully open to the life of God. The grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit are our homeland: loved and redeemed, we are set free to see things from God's point of view.