At the heart of this slender volume is a series of retreat addresses Rowan Williams first presented to the Anglican Benedictines of Holy Cross Convent in Leicestershire, which he later reworked and to which he added a couple of related essays. As it happened, I brought Passions of the Soul with me for a recent retreat, where I experienced through a slow, meditative reading of the text Williams’s unfailing pastoral insight. It is a gem. Like some of Williams’s other short books based on retreat addresses — his two sets of meditations on select icons of Christ and of Mary come to mind — Passions of the Soul merits multiple readings to savor the superb wordcraft and absorb the wisdom of its pages.

The brief foreword and lengthy introduction orient the reader to Williams’s topic: the teaching of early Eastern monastics on the principal interior obstacles to spiritual growth and strategies for overcoming them. He centers his exposition on texts written in 450-750, but also draws on earlier material, especially from Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), as well as later works in that treasury of Eastern monastic writing, the Philokalia. The introduction frames the rest of the teaching that is to come, and I focus my remarks on this early, informative material. Book I then delves into the eight “passions” as interpreted in the tradition; Williams also juxtaposes each of the eight Matthean Beatitudes as counter-remedies to them. The two essays of Book II survey the goal of Christian spirituality — or the challenge “To Stand Where Christ Stands” — from Paul through patristic writers to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. These chapters elucidate foundational questions from various angles, while indicating an essential unity in the spiritual quest across the centuries.

The passions under consideration are symptoms of a fundamental loss of freedom in the human soul. While we might think of passion, positively or negatively, as intense desire, the “fire in the belly” (Williams wryly observes that nowadays no CV is complete without a disclosure of one’s “passion” for the work), these uses of the word are secondary to the monastic authors. Passion is employed in their ascetical grammar in its root sense to indicate something we do not so much choose as undergo, even suffer.

Western Christians might recognize it as the condition stemming from original sin — parsed by Williams as the “spiritual handicaps we haven’t chosen but are stuck with.” Chief among these is the mental skew of “illusion,” which prevents us from seeing things as they are, in their natural simplicity, with clarity of vision. Instead, we tend to approach the world (including others) with the unstated questions, “What’s in it for me? How will this affect me or mine?” A self-centered perspective is seriously off-center, but we can’t seem to help it.

Small wonder early theologians referred to baptism as an “illumination”: the grace of seeing with the lights on; seeing, by small increments, the truth. But maturing into the baptismal life, of healing our disoriented and fractured selves, requires at least a lifetime of consistent ascetical effort. Our deep hope is grounded in the grace of Jesus Christ, who by his incarnation, death, and resurrection took our evil upon himself and transformed it. The Spirit opens a way into freedom, a defining quality of resurrection life. We are further helped by our innate longing for God, given in creation, what Williams calls “a kind of magnetic turning towards the real.”

Meanwhile, we need practical help to see straight, and here is where the early tradition comes to our aid. Williams insists, rightly, that these centuries knew no distinction between “theology” and what we would call “spirituality”; indeed, “Christian doctrine took its distinctive shape only through reflection on the distinctiveness of how Christian women and men actually prayed.” The guidance of the early monastics was shaped by their personal and corporate experience of struggle and prayer, their keen observations of the workings of their hearts, and the interventions of divine grace usually enacted in quite ordinary circumstances.

The passions are those framed by Evagrius of Pontus as the “Eight Thoughts,” which in turn passed into the Western tradition via John Cassian as the Seven Deadly Sins. This was an unfortunate recasting of Evagrius’s insightful diagnosis of our spiritual maladies, for what is at issue are not so much discrete acts of sin (although they can morph into sin) as thoughts, notions. Evagrius calls them logismoi. In his opening chapter, “Mapping the Passions of the Soul,” Williams shrewdly describes them as “corrupt chains of thought”: not mere “strings of mental ramblings but chains that bind us.” These logismoi can make us their prisoner, but it is possible to break these destructive bonds before they take over. Watchfulness over our thoughts from the very start is key here. Once we notice a vicious pattern beginning to lodge itself in our minds, we face it without undue anxiety and hand it over to God, casting ourselves upon divine mercy for help. Finally, we simply turn our attention to whatever task may be at hand and get on with it. No fuss.

Attaining the condition called apatheia is the object of these practices, but we must not confuse it with its entomological English relative, “apathy.” (Indeed, apathy could be traced to indifference or acedia, one of the deadly thoughts — what Williams characterizes as a cynical, perhaps coping, “whatever” attitude.) By contrast, apatheia is an “anticipation of the resurrection” (xiv), a state of inner freedom from enslaving, disordered, compulsive passion. Only apatheia makes authentic love possible, since it is free from our usual set of demands, whether spoken or not. “Apatheia has a daughter named agapé,” wrote Evagrius.

The aim here is to get beyond purely reactive responses to whatever life serves up. Humans have evolved a whole set of instinctive responses to situations that may please or threaten, instincts that have helped us survive and cope, and thus serve up to a point. But they have their limits. As Williams notes,

We have to negotiate our way by means of these instincts, yet they can get in the way of our full humanity if we don’t think through how they work. … For the Eastern Christian writers, “passion” is the whole realm of instinct, reaction, coping mechanisms, and this is the level at which complications arise. We cannot live without these things if we are to be human at all; yet unless we understand and in some degree transfigure them, we are trapped in something less than human. (xxii-xxiii)

As Williams, following the ancient writers, teases apart each of the Eight Thoughts along with its corresponding ameliorative Beatitude, we see the integrative theology of the Church’s first thousand years working to support praxis. The labor of habitual wakefulness does not take place in the echo chamber of one’s private thoughts, however. Its context is the faith and sacramental life of the community, and “it develops as we live a life involved with others, as we respond to situations and cope with a fluid and changing environment. … God has so shaped the world that we grow into our deepest freedom in a world of constraints and challenges.”

The teaching of these ancient guides is fundamentally hopeful. We don’t have to be trapped in self-defeating reactions that shrink our humanity, destroying the exchange of love with God and others for which we were made and for which we are destined in Christ. But we need education in the often subtle ways of the Spirit to get our bearings, sharpen our discernment of what’s really going on, and thus sustain a faithful response. Passions of the Soul offers such a needful mentorship.

In 1939, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Surrealist movement and declared that he would pursue the remainder of his artistic career as a classicist. It was not long after this that he renewed the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood, and turned at least some of his attention to portraying traditional Christian subject matter over the next few decades, albeit with a distinct Surrealist taste for the visionary (or the hallucinatory), which the artist described as part of the traditional Spanish propensity for the mystical as exemplified by 16th-century poet and writer St. John of the Cross, author of Dark Night of the Soul.

Among the best known and successful of these Catholic subjects is Dalí’s Vision of Saint John of the Cross, from 1951 (now in Glasgow), for which the artist prepared a large, breathtaking red-chalk drawing that is in the current exhibition of Dalí’s work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (through December). The striking and unusual perspective so masterfully executed is of the crucified Christ seen from above. It is one of the best and most classical of his pieces in the exhibit, if classicism is taken to mean stylistic harmony, order, unity, and “noble simplicity,” as art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann described it in the 18th century. Most of the work in the current exhibit, however, shows no signs of classical order and restraint, but rather reflects an almost Baroque sense of exuberant (or terrifying) complexity, movement, and chaos.

As if in search of Dalí’s classicism, the exhibit brings together not only the artist’s late work (after 1939) but also pieces dating to the 1920s, along with the work of old masters of European art from the museum’s permanent collection. This includes not only Bosch and Bruegel, but also El Greco, Zurbarán, Velasquez, Vermeer, and other Dutch Baroque artists, as well as that early 19th-century master of fantasy, Francisco Goya. Although the Dalí paintings are similar to the earlier masters in their technique of oil glazing and in their attention to detail, the subject matter in these paintings, including those executed after 1939, is anything but classical. It continues his earlier Surrealist pursuit of the hallucinatory and the incongruous, executed with an obsessive miniaturist’s eye for lucidity and precision, even when he turns his attention to Christian subjects.

He famously stated his intention of creating, with a camera’s accuracy, the dreamscape of the unconscious mind, the frontiers within, so to speak, producing “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he called them. The best of these follow his idiosyncratic obsessions wherever they take him, and include cannibalism, being devoured by insects, decaying donkey carcasses, rigidity in soft materials or softness in rigid objects, crutches supporting drooping substances, and pianos or jugs morphing into faces. These same hallucinogenic qualities characterize his religious works made after his return to Catholicism, but it is difficult to interpret what they might mean in this new Christian context.

In Dalí’s figure, clearly based on Michelangelo, the left hand rises as if to shield him from being recognized by paparazzi. Dalí’s figure loses all sense of composure and balance that Jesus has in the Michelangelo, and seemingly becomes a neurotic overcome with grief or shame who cannot even bear to look at the viewer. In fact, the face of Christ is usually not shown in these postwar Christian subjects by Dalí, and at least in one case, the visage of Christ is substituted with a masculine face of his wife, Gala, as in his Last Supper, in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington.

Gala also appears in Ecumenical Council as St. Helen (the mother of Constantine), but she seems miscast in this role, and the overly realistic (but beautifully rendered) portrayal of her is never believable as anything other than Gala posing in a costume. She looks directly and somewhat uneasily at the viewer, while below, Dalí glances away from his uninscribed canvas to something or someone just to the viewer’s left, as if momentarily distracted. In the heavens above float bishops and councils, like clouds rendered with a transparency and lightness that suggest dreams or opiated fantasies. An Annunciation also seems to be taking place in the sky, no doubt another historical quotation.

But what are St. Helen, a terrified, nearly nude, colossal, faceless Christ, swarms of tiny bishops and prelates and an Annunciation supposed to signify? It is not easy to discern what the artist meant to convey.

I suppose it may reflect a general optimism for the leadership of the newly elected Pope John XXIII, who in the previous year had welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Vatican, and who was shortly to call the Second Vatican Council (in Roman Catholic parlance, the 21st ecumenical council, though not defined as such by Anglicans). But the elements in the Dalí painting do not add up to any discernable meaning, as far as I can see. More like a fever dream or an acid trip than a mystical vision, paintings like this are classical only in their technique.

Despite the failure of most of his religious subjects, in my opinion, the exhibit in Boston presents a cogent overview of the artist’s Surrealist period of the 1930s, including some of his best work from that decade, and so the show is worthwhile. Unfortunately, there is no catalogue for the exhibit.

Biographer Ian Gibson has suggested that Dalí’s embrace of Catholicism was part of ingratiating himself with the fascist government of Spain after the war, which was vehemently Catholic. He was previously removed from the Surrealist group because of his portrayal of fascist leaders in his work, including Hitler.

Almost all of Dalí’s Catholic work is characterized by this insincerity — it always seems so forced and artificial. In his Vision of Saint John of the Cross, however, the artist is illustrating not his own but someone else’s vision, based on the saint’s description of his transcendent experience. Its authenticity in Dalí’s Catholic oeuvre is unique.

Book titles can be tricky. Some are cute and clever, leaving readers wondering what they will find inside. Others appear direct and straightforward, but lead to surprises once the cover is opened. Samuel Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane’s new work, How to Use the Book of Common Prayer: A Guide to the Anglican Liturgy, falls into the latter category. It’s not that the title is incorrect; the book does indeed provide a thorough guide to the intentions, spirituality, and practical use of the Book of Common Prayer — just not the one you might expect. This book is a user manual to the International Version of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer published by InterVarsity Press in 2021, edited by Bray and Keane.

Once that initial confusion is cleared up, the book’s intention becomes quite clear: it introduces non-Anglican evangelicals discovering liturgy for the first time to a venerable and time-tested expression of Christian worship, a solid, stately liturgy with a Reformation edge.

Keane and Bray’s book accomplishes this task admirably, beginning with the reasons for liturgy, how it might be both more biblical and evangelical than modern prejudices might imply, moving to a quick history underscoring the Reformation heritage of the Book of Common Prayer, then exploring the central liturgies with an eye to both page-flipping mechanics (keyed to the page numbers of the International Edition) and the spirituality underpinning these interconnected rites.

While the histories of the various services are touched upon as needed, the focus is consistently on how the praying person can appreciate and internalize the theology and spirituality encoded within the prayer book’s system of devotion. The language is clear and engaging, attentive to the kinds of questions and concerns a loosely Calvinist nondenominational believer might ask upon encountering these liturgies, i.e., how rigid liturgies can also be “prayer of the heart,” and what to make of infant baptism.

As they proceed through Mattins and Evensong, Baptism, and Eucharist, Bray and Keane demonstrate how these 1662 liturgies broadly follow a consistent four-step pattern: keeping liturgies passed down through the ages, simplifying them, pruning away medieval additions and elaborations, and bringing a Reformation emphasis on faith through hearing God’s Word. As they explain the contents and spiritual movements of the liturgies, they continually engage five themes they see as the keys to the Book of Common Prayer: “the gospel, thoroughly catholic and thoroughly reformed doctrine, simplicity, and beauty.” If ever one of these principles is suppressed or soft-pedaled it is, not surprisingly, the “thoroughly catholic” one.

Of course, living into a prayer book requires more than just understanding the text on the page; liturgies are inhabited by communities, and patterns of practice shape how the words are lived. The authors are well aware of this fact, and discuss how the liturgies were used in context. The context they offer is specifically that of the Lutheran-Calvinist blend that marked the early English Reformation, and especially the heritage of the 1552 Protestant revision of the Book of Common Prayer that the 1662 book continues. Accordingly, the authors place an emphasis not only on Mattins and Evensong as the daily prayers of the church, but also central services for the Sunday worship of the community; full Communion services (as opposed to the more common truncated Ante-Communion) are recommended monthly or quarterly, which they correctly note “remained the usual practice of most Anglican churches until the second half of the twentieth century.”

Thus, Bray and Keane have produced a fantastic resource to be studied alongside their International Edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. They introduce its rites and logics to Christians unfamiliar with liturgical practices, who might bring lingering suspicions of fixed rites, explaining how this Scripture-centered worship connects both to the experience of the first Christians and to the Reformation faith informed by Luther and Calvin, Jewell, and Hooker. The focus is never on history for its own sake, but on the gospel-centered theology and spirituality that flow from the long-term immersion within these rites, forming Christians who live their faith in both word and deed.

What is the utility of this book to someone like me, though — a Catholic-leaning Episcopalian committed to the use of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer? As a scholar with an academic interest in the topic and an aficionado of the spectrum of prayer book liturgies, I appreciate this work especially because it challenges my assumptions and presuppositions. As one who learned about the 1662 prayer book at the feet of decidedly Catholic Tractarian and Ritualist luminaries like Blunt, Proctor, Wordsworth, and Frere, the relentlessly Reformation perspective of this guide made me question and re-examine what I thought of these rites, causing me several times to dive into not just the 1662 prayer book, but several of its predecessors as well, to clarify what was being expressed.

I do think the work downplays the rich Catholic heritage of the prayer book tradition, and makes occasional missteps and obfuscations that conceal it. Nods to the early Church and Church Fathers inevitably become citations of Augustine in his Reformation-approved dress. This is perfectly understandable, given the direction of the work and the lingering anti-Catholic sentiment I’m familiar with from many non-denominational believers, but I think opportunities were missed to connect the deep history of the prayer book with the work of the Holy Spirit through the centuries. Ironically, one of the few times this deep history comes up is when it is leveraged against alternate prayer books: the discussion of the eucharistic lectionary of 1662 touts its continuity with the church of the sixth century in order to assert its superiority over the late 20th-century Revised Common Lectionary.

Indeed, it’s inevitable that a work of this kind will draw contrasts between the 1662 book under discussion and the books used by modern Anglican and Episcopal Churches. While comparisons of this kind do occasionally crop up, their purpose is rarely to vilify the current liturgies (apart from a crack at a figurative recent remodeling of the stately Anglican dwelling covering rich wood floors with “linoleum and orange shag carpet”) and they are kept to a minimum; the goal is primarily to promote the 1662 rather than to tear down later editions.

But what of the non-scholar? Will average users of the 1979 or even the 1928 Book of Common Prayer find here inspiration for their spiritual journey? As much as I hate to say it, I suspect the answer is no. First, this work is a guidebook to the International Edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Without that edition at hand, the book’s purpose as a guide is diminished. Having written a similar guidebook for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, I know from experience how tightly tied such a guide must be to the text it seeks to explain.

Second, there is, in fact, a gulf between the 1662 edition and the American 1928 and 1979 revisions. The structure and content of the Communion service in the 1662 book directly follows that of the 1552, with reception of the elements directly after the Words of Institution and before the Oblation and praying of the Lord’s Prayer — right in the middle of the Eucharistic prayer from the perspective of the American books. This is because American prayer books have followed the Scottish pattern that hearkens back to the 1549 prayer book, which lacks some of the Reformed elements that characterize both the 1552 and 1662 revisions. As the structure and content differ, so too do the theology and spirituality that flow from it.

Undoubtedly there are nuggets of wisdom and truths about Anglican liturgy generally any believer can find in this guidebook. However, apart from the comparative study of a near relative on the prayer book family tree, I don’t see this work finding much utility in a 1979 or even a 1928 BCP parish.

Dr. Derek Olsen is a biblical scholar and engaged layman in the Episcopal Church.

Since the mid-19th century, when the Cambridge Camden Society, also known as the Ecclesiologists, began to advocate for medieval “pointed” architecture as uniquely appropriate for sacred buildings, the Gothic Revival has held a privileged position as the “correct” style for churches. A side effect of the Ecclesiologists’ very successful advocacy for Gothic has been a certain disregard for the classically styled church buildings dating from the immediately preceding years around 1800, which the Ecclesiologists unfairly disparaged as plain and undistinguished. Christopher Webster’s thoroughly researched and carefully argued book, copiously illustrated with 378 beautiful new photographs by Geoff Brandwood, aims to revise that conventional wisdom.

Webster argues that, at a time when the established church faced challenges both external (the growth of Nonconformism and Catholicism, the Napoleonic wars, alienation from the lower classes) and internal (inefficiencies, mismanagement, and abuses), the building program that produced over 1,500 new churches was an expression of confidence. In an era that prized the importance of reason, the national church wanted to discourage both Nonconformist “enthusiasm” and Roman “superstition”; thus, both in liturgy and architecture, the idea of rational, well-ordered worship guided many decisions.

This is evident, for example, in the floor plans of the buildings. In contrast to both Catholic churches (which placed the central focus on the altar), or Nonconformist Protestant chapels (which centered on the preacher in the pulpit), Anglican churches strove for a harmonious accommodation of both pulpit and altar. Still, the “auditory worship” of spoken Morning and Evening Prayer was the top priority in shaping these buildings (which the Ecclesiologists later dismissed as “preaching boxes” or “sermon houses”), and Communion was less frequent, which meant that the pulpit was usually more prominent than the altar. Singers and musicians were placed in galleries well away from the chancel (to emphasize their secular status), and the distinctive three-decker pulpit placed the clerk at the bottom, the middle level for reading the service and prayers, and the top level for preaching the sermon, so it could be clearly heard throughout the space.

As regards the question of style, the Classical predominated until the end of the 18th century because it was seen as rational and harmonious in form. By the early 19th century, however, even before the rise of the Ecclesiologists, the Gothic had begun to rise in popularity because of its association with English tradition and the historical continuity of the church (as against French radicalism). For readers familiar with the eventual triumph of the Gothic, Webster’s presentation of important Classical achievements such as St. Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury (George Steuart, 1790-92), or St. Peter’s, Walworth (John Soane, 1823-25), will be novel and enlightening. In its richness of detail, this book can also serve as a guide to social and economic aspects of the Church of England during the period in question. Thoroughly practical questions — who pays for a new building, how the financing will be arranged, where it will be located, and how big it needs to be — shed light on the worldly side of spiritual matters. Pew rents, for example, were seen as regrettable but unavoidable, given the need for funds. In booming industrial areas, congregations overflowed the space available in existing churches, but the working class could not pay for expensive new buildings. Showing how countless, now-obscure, local clergy and lay leaders responded to such challenges to create works of real beauty, Webster’s book splendidly recovers an unfairly maligned period of architectural history, and introduces readers to a set of monuments worth appreciating in their own right.

At the heart of this slender volume is a series of retreat addresses Rowan Williams first presented to the Anglican Benedictines of Holy Cross Convent in Leicestershire, which he later reworked and to which he added a couple of related essays. As it happened, I brought Passions of the Soul with me for a recent retreat, where I experienced through a slow, meditative reading of the text Williams’s unfailing pastoral insight. It is a gem. Like some of Williams’s other short books based on retreat addresses — his two sets of meditations on select icons of Christ and of Mary come to mind — Passions of the Soul merits multiple readings to savor the superb wordcraft and absorb the wisdom of its pages.

The brief foreword and lengthy introduction orient the reader to Williams’s topic: the teaching of early Eastern monastics on the principal interior obstacles to spiritual growth and strategies for overcoming them. He centers his exposition on texts written in 450-750, but also draws on earlier material, especially from Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), as well as later works in that treasury of Eastern monastic writing, the Philokalia. The introduction frames the rest of the teaching that is to come, and I focus my remarks on this early, informative material. Book I then delves into the eight “passions” as interpreted in the tradition; Williams also juxtaposes each of the eight Matthean Beatitudes as counter-remedies to them. The two essays of Book II survey the goal of Christian spirituality — or the challenge “To Stand Where Christ Stands” — from Paul through patristic writers to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. These chapters elucidate foundational questions from various angles, while indicating an essential unity in the spiritual quest across the centuries.

The passions under consideration are symptoms of a fundamental loss of freedom in the human soul. While we might think of passion, positively or negatively, as intense desire, the “fire in the belly” (Williams wryly observes that nowadays no CV is complete without a disclosure of one’s “passion” for the work), these uses of the word are secondary to the monastic authors. Passion is employed in their ascetical grammar in its root sense to indicate something we do not so much choose as undergo, even suffer.

Western Christians might recognize it as the condition stemming from original sin — parsed by Williams as the “spiritual handicaps we haven’t chosen but are stuck with.” Chief among these is the mental skew of “illusion,” which prevents us from seeing things as they are, in their natural simplicity, with clarity of vision. Instead, we tend to approach the world (including others) with the unstated questions, “What’s in it for me? How will this affect me or mine?” A self-centered perspective is seriously off-center, but we can’t seem to help it.

Small wonder early theologians referred to baptism as an “illumination”: the grace of seeing with the lights on; seeing, by small increments, the truth. But maturing into the baptismal life, of healing our disoriented and fractured selves, requires at least a lifetime of consistent ascetical effort. Our deep hope is grounded in the grace of Jesus Christ, who by his incarnation, death, and resurrection took our evil upon himself and transformed it. The Spirit opens a way into freedom, a defining quality of resurrection life. We are further helped by our innate longing for God, given in creation, what Williams calls “a kind of magnetic turning towards the real.”

Meanwhile, we need practical help to see straight, and here is where the early tradition comes to our aid. Williams insists, rightly, that these centuries knew no distinction between “theology” and what we would call “spirituality”; indeed, “Christian doctrine took its distinctive shape only through reflection on the distinctiveness of how Christian women and men actually prayed.” The guidance of the early monastics was shaped by their personal and corporate experience of struggle and prayer, their keen observations of the workings of their hearts, and the interventions of divine grace usually enacted in quite ordinary circumstances.

The passions are those framed by Evagrius of Pontus as the “Eight Thoughts,” which in turn passed into the Western tradition via John Cassian as the Seven Deadly Sins. This was an unfortunate recasting of Evagrius’s insightful diagnosis of our spiritual maladies, for what is at issue are not so much discrete acts of sin (although they can morph into sin) as thoughts, notions. Evagrius calls them logismoi. In his opening chapter, “Mapping the Passions of the Soul,” Williams shrewdly describes them as “corrupt chains of thought”: not mere “strings of mental ramblings but chains that bind us.” These logismoi can make us their prisoner, but it is possible to break these destructive bonds before they take over. Watchfulness over our thoughts from the very start is key here. Once we notice a vicious pattern beginning to lodge itself in our minds, we face it without undue anxiety and hand it over to God, casting ourselves upon divine mercy for help. Finally, we simply turn our attention to whatever task may be at hand and get on with it. No fuss.

Attaining the condition called apatheia is the object of these practices, but we must not confuse it with its entomological English relative, “apathy.” (Indeed, apathy could be traced to indifference or acedia, one of the deadly thoughts — what Williams characterizes as a cynical, perhaps coping, “whatever” attitude.) By contrast, apatheia is an “anticipation of the resurrection” (xiv), a state of inner freedom from enslaving, disordered, compulsive passion. Only apatheia makes authentic love possible, since it is free from our usual set of demands, whether spoken or not. “Apatheia has a daughter named agapé,” wrote Evagrius.

The aim here is to get beyond purely reactive responses to whatever life serves up. Humans have evolved a whole set of instinctive responses to situations that may please or threaten, instincts that have helped us survive and cope, and thus serve up to a point. But they have their limits. As Williams notes,

We have to negotiate our way by means of these instincts, yet they can get in the way of our full humanity if we don’t think through how they work. … For the Eastern Christian writers, “passion” is the whole realm of instinct, reaction, coping mechanisms, and this is the level at which complications arise. We cannot live without these things if we are to be human at all; yet unless we understand and in some degree transfigure them, we are trapped in something less than human. (xxii-xxiii)

As Williams, following the ancient writers, teases apart each of the Eight Thoughts along with its corresponding ameliorative Beatitude, we see the integrative theology of the Church’s first thousand years working to support praxis. The labor of habitual wakefulness does not take place in the echo chamber of one’s private thoughts, however. Its context is the faith and sacramental life of the community, and “it develops as we live a life involved with others, as we respond to situations and cope with a fluid and changing environment. … God has so shaped the world that we grow into our deepest freedom in a world of constraints and challenges.”

The teaching of these ancient guides is fundamentally hopeful. We don’t have to be trapped in self-defeating reactions that shrink our humanity, destroying the exchange of love with God and others for which we were made and for which we are destined in Christ. But we need education in the often subtle ways of the Spirit to get our bearings, sharpen our discernment of what’s really going on, and thus sustain a faithful response. Passions of the Soul offers such a needful mentorship.

The Rev. Dr. Julia Gatta is the Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Pastoral Theology in the University of the South’s School of Theology.