Review of Passions of the Soul

Williams, Rowan. Passions of the Soul. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024, pp. 160, $15, paperback.

Williams’s integrative style offers a rare blend of ecumenical vision, biblical imagination, historical and linguistic awareness, devotional instruction, homiletic wisdom, and significant theological cues for further systematic thinking in theological anthropology and Christian metaphysics.

Rowan Williams is one of the foremost living Anglican theologians. He is a former Archbishop of Canterbury and was the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. He has authored countless theological books in academic, pastoral, and popular registers, including Christ the Heart of Creation, The Edge of Words, and On Augustine. Much in the vein of his Looking East in Winter, Rowan Williams seeks in his recent monograph–Passions of the Soul–to retrieve illumination and wisdom from the Eastern Christian tradition in a cultural moment of spiritual ‘winter’ in which the meaning of God and the human seem to have either been forgotten or trivialised. More specifically, what Williams seeks to recover from the Eastern monastic tradition (as distilled in the 18th-century anthology of contemplative Greek texts known as the Philokalia – ‘the love of the beautiful’) is the vital place of the ‘passions’ in everyday life and their deep entwinement with the Christian vision of reality as a whole. Indeed, as Williams clarifies, for this tradition, ‘the purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the gift of his Holy Spirit, is [precisely] the conquest of passion. . . . [T]he life of freedom from passion – apatheia — [is] the resurrection life, the life of the Spirit in us’ (p. xxv).

The early fifth-century language around the ‘passions’, as Williams himself concedes, is “not all that easy for a contemporary Western Christian to digest. The vocabulary can be puzzling” (p. xiii), and it is partially adopted from the ‘philosophy and psychology of their own world’ (p. xxviii). Yet, what Williams does in this two-part volume is a) to translate these ancient teachings into a living and vibrant vision of the entire cosmos and of human creatures ‘growing steadily into the depths of God’s mystery and God’s beauty’ (p. 62), b) to offer winsome and realistic pastoral guidance for the ‘prosaic’ details of modern life and relationships, and c) to ground the relevance of this teaching in the witness of the New Testament and the historical development of early Christian practice.

The early fifth century language around the ‘passions’, as Williams himself concedes, is “not all that easy for a contemporary Western Christian to digest. The vocabulary can be puzzling” (p. xiii), and it is partially adopted from the ‘philosophy and psychology of their own world’ (p. xxviii). Yet, what Williams does in this two-part volume is a) to translate these ancient teachings into a living and vibrant vision of the entire cosmos and of human creatures ‘growing steadily into the depths of God’s mystery and God’s beauty’ (p. 62), b) to offer winsome and realistic pastoral guidance for the ‘prosaic’ details of modern life and relationships, and c) to ground the relevance of this teaching in the witness of the New Testament and the historical development of early Christian practice.

Rowan Williams seeks in his recent monograph–Passions of the Soul–to retrieve illumination and wisdom from the Eastern Christian tradition in a cultural moment of spiritual ‘winter’ in which the meaning of God and the human seem to have either been forgotten or trivialised.

The crucial insight for Williams in this monastic tradition, exemplified by Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian in the first volume of the Philokalia, was to recognise that as created beings there are two clusters of  “instinct or reactive habit in us” – passions –  that can distort our perception of reality and obscure our relations to God and other people –  aggression and greediness (p. xxxi). As fallen human creatures, ‘we don’t see things as we ought to see them’ (p. xv-xvi), and more often than not the world can appear like “a jungle or supermarket” (p. xxvii). The eight passions of the soul listed by John Cassian are creatively mapped out by Williams as ‘reversed images’ of the Beatitudes named by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. The practical outlook Williams advances is to treat such passions as ‘natural and unavoidable’ (p. 54) and ‘the distortion of something positive’ (p. 54). So, for example, the passion of pride is the reversed image of poverty of spirit, the passion of listlessness, the reversed image of mourning, and so on.On this view, temptation is ‘testing’ which involves these passions being ‘honestly registered’ and either ‘given to God’, leading to clarity of vision or being obsessed over (pp. 4-6), leading to clouded vision. The focus of diagnosis is not on ‘individual fault’ (p. 14),  ‘individual human qualities’ (p. 42), or ‘wrong action’ (p. 9), but on how well we are or are not in tune with the rest of creation (p. 42) and the living Triune God. To do this involves not just self-examination but conversation with another person who can serve as an ‘experienced guide’ (p. 8).

According to Williams, the ‘paradox’ of the Christian life (pp. xxii, 46, 53,59, 62, 88, 94, 95, 97, 107) – an often neglected theological theme –  is that we must ‘acknowledge and accept what and where we are as created beings’ (p. 64) because ‘becoming more creaturely, getting more deeply in touch with our createdness, is how we more profoundly and fully come to share the life of the creator, the life of Christ himself’ (p. 46). As modern readers, we might erroneously associate the goal of apatheia with apathy (p. xv) and the removal of desire, but life in the Body of Christ is, as Williams contends, relational (p. 42), artistic (p. 82), political (p. 93), even erotic (p. 95). Apatheia, properly understood, is ‘the clarity and spaciousness of vision that God wants for us’ (p. xviii). Stated provocatively, ‘the mistake is to want to stop wanting’ (p. 57). If we are to see reality as it is and live a fully human life, then we must have our “eyes opened to God and to the world”(p. xi) and our desires expanded by being conformed to Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit. He writes,

‘[T]he love that the Holy Trinity enjoys, as St John’s Gospel puts it in the Farewell Discourses of Jesus at the Last Supper, is about the beholding of glory. Remember Jesus’ resonant words in that section of John’s gospel, the prayer that the disciples will share in ‘the glory wish I had with thee before the world was made’ (Jn 17.5) Jesus prays to the Father for this sharing; it is what Jesus desires to share with us […] So the rationale of your existence and mine is that ‘glory’ should be shared. We are made, as unlikely as this sounds, for seeing and sharing glory’ (pp. xix-xx)

Thus, spiritual life is connected closely with the problem of vision, the prosaic details of our everyday instincts and reactions, and the eschatological prospect of beholding glory. To frame this writing simply as a contribution to ‘Christian spirituality’, ‘doctrine’, ‘ethics’, or ‘pastoral theology’ misses the organic unity so integral to this era of Christian thought and practice. As Williams observes, “one of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine and prayer and ethics don’t exist in tidy compartments: each one shapes the others” (p. 112). Williams’s integrative style offers a rare blend of ecumenical vision, biblical imagination, historical and linguistic awareness, devotional instruction, homiletic wisdom, and significant theological cues for further systematic thinking in theological anthropology and Christian metaphysics. Where his proposal might be deemed weaker (from an Evangelical, Reformed, or Catholic perspective) is in its implied doctrine of sin which lacks the full elaboration of Original Sin found in the Augustinian tradition or his speculative thought on divine desire (p. 95). To adjudicate Williams’s view on this first matter, see On Augustine. All in all, this is a very learned and pastorally insightful volume of retrieval theology offering an accessible and lively bridge for the undergraduate student to the tradition of Eastern Orthodox spirituality (or for a Christian layperson or pastor who does not belong to the EO tradition), written by a specialist who is himself Anglican.