Scattered thoughts on Maximus and detachment

love without passion

In my teaching I end up teaching all sorts of things that I am not really an expert in, just that I know Greek and Latin quite well. And I'm often getting people to read things that I think might be interesting.

So this term I have a group reading Maximus the Confessor in Greek. Maximus is very trendy in patristics these days, but I don't really know that much about him. We're reading his "4 centuries on love" which sounds like an intergenerational dynastic novel set in Tuscany or something, but actually it's 400 paragraphs in which Maximus collects monastic wisdom on the divine love and the life in pursuit of it.

One of the things that is difficult for us moderns is the concept of apatheia in Greek monastic literature. The idea that God is passionless and that we, in turn, are to be passionless. The difficulty is twofold - we don't understand them and we misunderstand them.

1.36 Apatheia is a peaceful disposition of the soul, according to which it becomes stubbornly reluctant to move towards the evil.

1.1 Love is a good disposition of the soul, according to which one prefers nothing that exists in preference to the knowledge of God; it is impossible to enter into this habit of love, having an attachment towards any earthly thing.

We think of being passionate as a good thing. Shouldn't we care deeply about things? Isn't a passion the deepest expression of my identity? That's why we have the Passion 'translation', and endless other christian-esque things called passion.

Passions, for the Ancients, are things that happen to us, not arise from the essence of who we are. We suffer them, and are at their whim and wont. That's why when Vergil wrote "love conquers all" he didn't mean "true love always finds a way to overcome external obstacles", he meant "love is a wild frenzied madness that conquers you and makes you crazy"

And so the impassibility of God is the doctrine that God, ultimately, is not subject to outside forces that make him do, or feel, X Y or Z. He is sovereign even over what we call emotions. Feelings don't happen to God, God happens to feelings.

God is, in this sense dispassionate. But he is no less Divine Love! And so those who would pursue God must also cultivate apatheia, dispassionateness. But doesn't this sound  more like Buddhism than Christianity?

Here is where I wonder if reading our Greek monastics with a slice of Augustine would help us. Augustine's take that we have disordered desires, that we love things in place of God, when we are to love them both after God, and in God, suggests a way to understand the love of the temporal in light of the eternal.

1.7. If the soul is superior to the body, and the God who has create the universe is incomparably greater than the universe, the person who prefers the body over the soul, and the universe created by God, over God himself, in no way differs from the idolaters.

1.18 Fortunate is the person who doesn't have any attachment to any perishable or temporary thing.

The problem with attachment is this: we love the temporal as if eternal, and esteem the eternal ad if temporal. To become unattached in this sense would mean to learn  to treat the temporal as temporal, and the eternal as eternal. Then we would be free to love the temporal as we should, in and for the eternal.

For Maximus, love clearly isn’t a passion, it’s the disposition freed from passion. The mind rightly oriented towards God comes to love all people equally - the virtuous because of their virtue, the wicked in mercy on their lostness.