The passions: eight habits to navigate

In his latest book Passions of the Soul theologian and former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, explores the fundamental instincts that shape human behaviour. Delving into early Eastern-Christian theology, he examines eight passions: pride, listlessness, anger, gluttony, avarice, lust, envy and despair. How can we navigate these tendencies in ourselves? Could we move beyond mere ‘passionate’ reaction and grow into a deeper sense of freedom? Williams searches for answers in the eight beatitudes as expressed by Jesus, offering a path towards spiritual maturation.  

You connect the eight passions as introduced by the early monastic writer John Cassian with the eight beatitudes of Jesus. What inspired you to do that?

“I think I first had the idea when I was taking part in a Christian-Buddhist retreat about fifteen years ago. We were looking at questions about disturbances of the self, and it just crossed my mind that there were eight passions in Cassian’s writings, just as there are eight beatitudes in the New Testament. Maybe, I thought, there was something to be said for trying to put them together, to see if the beatitudes would give us a sense of what a life free from compulsions and addictions might look like.”

Most of the passions are widely known as ‘the deadly sins’. Are you trying to rewrite this narrative, by reframing ‘sins’ as ‘passions’?

“Yes, in a way. I try to give a positive rather than just a negative picture. The trouble is that the seven deadly sins has given generations of people the idea that there are ‘seven things you should not do’. The early Christian tradition I refer to, says it is not about things you should not do; it rather is about eight habits that can imprison you, that can trap you.”

You argue it is important to grow from our passions into a freer disposition. This suggests a strong belief in our ability to self-control. Are we able to train our passions, like we can train our bodies?

“I believe the Desert Fathers are telling us, first and foremost, to simply observe what unfolds within us. They are urging us to watch what happens inside, to become aware of our instinctive reactions. Then, the contemplative task sets in. Not by using your will to control your emotions, which is a mistake we often make, but by allowing yourself to be silent, allowing the water to become smooth again, as the Buddhists say.

They are urging us to watch what happens inside, to become aware of our instinctive reactions

“That involves bodily and mental discipline. It involves having a sharp eye for when fantasies or dreams take over the mind. We need to have work to do, we need to use our bodies sensibly, we need to say the Psalms, we need to have simple forms of prayer, such as ‘Lord have mercy’.”

When are we wrongly using our will to control our emotions? Do you have an example?

“There is this very interesting passage by C.S. Lewis, the great English Christian apologist, who says that we are expecting too much of the will. He uses the example of somebody who thinks ‘Right, I’m not going to have a drink for the next hour’. He then starts worrying ‘Oh God, I want to drink, but I mustn’t have a drink, I absolutely mustn’t have a drink for the next hour. Ah! I spent the whole hour thinking about not having a drink’, and then forty minutes later he decides that he better has a drink after all. The thing is: go do something else, go dig in the garden.”

So, contemplative action?

“Yes, Saint Teresa of Ávila explains in her books on prayer that, at the end of the day, the boundary line between contemplation and action becomes very uncertain, because you are doing things in a spirit of presence and stillness. This overall focus you hope to grow into during prayer then spills over into your ordinary tasks. You know, you can recognize a contemplative by how they do the washing up.”

In eastern spirituality, for example Taoism, the body and the breath play a fundamental role in restraining our desires and passions. What has Christianity to offer in this regard?

“The sad thing is that particularly in modern Western Christianity, we have predominantly concentrated on the will, the ideas of the mind. But the early Eastern-Christian thinkers I write about have actually a lot of knowing on what to do with the body. When they write about ‘Logos’, the word, they actually mean something quite similar to ‘the Tao’ from Taoism; the hum that penetrates all things. There is a kind of harmony in the universe, they say, and we need to be singing in tune. I think this idea is deeply built into early Eastern Christianity, that our freedom and dignity as human beings is most fulfilled when we are singing in tune.”

There is a kind of harmony in the universe, they say, and we need to be singing in tune

Additionally, you write ‘our own breathing in and out happens only within and because […] of the life-giving breath that is God’s gift’.

“Yes, so the idea is to follow the rhythm of your own breath, find the centre of your body and carry the words of your prayer on the exhale. This will be familiar to people who know a bit about Buddhist meditation, but all of that is also part of early Eastern-Christian wisdom.”

People seem to be looking for that kind of embodiment, as the popularity of mindfulness in Western Europe illustrates.

“Definitely; I remember a few years ago, when I was still teaching at Cambridge, I was being asked by the ‘University mindfulness group’ to give them a talk on Christian meditation. People had no idea there was anything in our tradition that spoke about these things. While actually many documents, from about the sixth or seventh century right through to the fourteenth century, give regular reflection on how you settle your body, how you get into the right bodily frame to approach God or let God approach you.”

What is the right bodily frame?

“The advice on posture and breath differs between disciplines, but I think the main idea is to learn to actually fully see what is in front of your eyes. If you are constantly looking at the world with a vision that is obstructed by internal anxiety or shaped by addictive patterns of thought, you cannot see clearly. Or in modern terms, if you are constantly looking at your screen, you quite literally do not see what is in front of you. So what about settling into your body? To the extent that you can keep your eyes open and your head up? And actually see the people you meet; to respond to them, not as how you would like them to be, but as they are.”

You describe how ‘avarice’ as a passion can be seen as a longing for control. For example, we want to control our own image and how others perceive us.

“Yes, controlling the way people see us is obsessive for so many people. We are all involved in that, I as much as anyone, and it is something that we are so readily drawn into. There is this Catholic writer from the seventeenth century who writes about making acts of resignation. Ask yourself: what if I were very ill and could not do anything about it? What if I were descending into dementia and there is nothing I can do? What if I were publicly humiliated by something I had done? Try to imagine and then ask yourself, how bad is it? Could I live with that? He does not mean dwelling on potential challenges, but his message is: remember your value. Your worth does not depend on control, it depends on you being loved by God.”

In a way, we should first experience our passions to know how we ideally would want to interact with them. Do you think we can constructively practice our passions through art, literature or sports?

“Yes, absolutely. There is a spectrum of human activities that push the greedy, busy, obsessive ego out of the way. A friend of mine recently wrote a thesis on the theology and spirituality of leisure. It’s interesting when you hear athletes talk about their bodily involvement, the sense of both release and focus they experience, and this idea of being in tune with something bigger than you can rationally comprehend. The runner, the football player, the swimmer – all of them speak of this kind of ‘tuning in’.

The runner, the football player, the swimmer – all of them speak of this kind of ‘tuning in’

“And I absolutely agree about art. If you come back from a performance of, say, Shakespeare’s King Lear, you don’t just feel miserable. You feel something has been washed away from you, your own preoccupation with your own petty concerns, your own inward triviality and selfish obsession. Or think of the tragedy of Othello: what if there were no limits to envy and possessiveness? It ends up destroying what it loves. So, without reducing these great plays to simple moral lessons, they do show us dimensions of humanity that we need to be conscious of.”

You feel something has been washed away from you, your own preoccupation with your own petty concerns, your own inward triviality and selfish obsession

It is that time of the year in which many of us listen to the St. Matthew Passion. Here, ‘passion’ refers to the suffering of Christ. Do we, in our own human way, suffer from our passions?

“Yes, I think it is important that the word ‘passion’ in Greek and Latin means something ‘done to you’, something you would ‘endure’. So, the events that happen to us or put us at the mercy of circumstances. The Passion of Christ is what Christ endures.

“I think that when we listen to the St. Matthew Passion, that in itself is an extraordinary exploration of the emotions that are created in us by the spectacle. It is that absolute exposure to the depth of feeling. To do that, music does not depend on ideas but simply opens up places in our soul, beyond the limits of the passions.”

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