Andrew Louth - Syriac Christian Church

40 INTRODUCTION
attachment to the truth. ‘Just as the thought of fire does not warm the
body, so faith without love does not actualize the light of spiritual
knowledge in the soul’ (CC I.31). He warns that ‘unless the intellect
finds something more noble to which it may transfer its desire, it will
not be persuaded to scorn [earthly things] completely’ (CC III.64).
Simply to free oneself from the passions will lead to no lasting good:
passion-free knowledge of divine things does not persuade the
intellect to scorn material things completely; it is like the
passion-free thought of a sensible thing. It is therefore possible to
find many men who have much knowledge and yet wallow in the
passions of the flesh like pigs in the mire. Through their
diligence they temporarily cleanse themselves and attain
knowledge, but then they grow negligent.
(CC III.66)
What is required, Maximus insists, is a love for God more powerful
than any love we may have for earthly things:
just as passion-free thought of human things does not compel
the intellect to scorn divine things, so passion-free knowledge of
divine things does not fully persuade it to scorn human things.
For in this world truth exists in shadows and conjectures; that is
why there is need for the blessed passion of holy love, which binds
the intellect to spiritual contemplation and persuades it to prefer
what is immaterial to what is material, and what is intelligible
and divine to what is apprehended by the senses.
(CC III.67)
‘The blessed passion of holy love’: this is an odd phrase, since, as we
have seen, in the Byzantine ascetic tradition, ‘passion’ nearly always
indicates something evil (it is often, even in Maximus, more or less the
equivalent of ‘vice’). 15 More starkly still, we have already learnt from
Maximus that ‘dispassion engenders love’ (CC I.2). If we look closely
at what Maximus has to say about apatheia, dispassion, we shall find
that he is aware of the danger of an apatheia that is merely
disinterestedness: apatheia must be a purified love. He seeks to
prevent misunderstanding here with his very definition of passion:
‘passion is an impulse of the soul contrary to nature’ (CC II.16; my
italics: cf. ibid. I.35). The passions to be expelled are those that are
contrary to nature: there are natural passions that are perfectly proper.
Apatheia, then, is the restoration of what is natural (that is, what is in
accordance with unfallen nature). But Maximus goes further than
this. For him, detachment from the irrational parts of the soul is the