Passion's pedigree - beyond the lover and the bard
ROME: 10th April 2006 -- 'Passion is in good (statistical)
company' we said in #1522. Passion sometimes keeps lesser
company. Recall 'predominant passions'? Christian
spirituality eagerly seized
the term, but so did skeptics like
the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote an essay on human nature
where 'predominant
passion' takes on the nature of violence. It is clear that we
need a more purebred pedigree for passion than our post-Enlightenment
period
offers us, lurching as it does between 'base passion' and things too
high for us to contemplate;
we simply lose our bearings. As Robert Browning put it: The high that proved too high, the heroic for
earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in
the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard.
('Abt Vogler',
1864)
Lovers and bards have something
to offer, but unfortunately 'passion' is one of the least agreed upon
words
in
our time. We need to call on cultural memory.
Occasionally one reads things
like 'the original Christian meaning
of the term...'. Such is not helpful for establishing the
importance
of passion in human experience. We read this kind of thing in the
mixed bag of comments following the release of Gibson's The Passion of
the Christ. To begin with, 'Passion' with a capital 'P' has quite
a
special meaning in Christian discourse. No need to delay on this,
nor
to state the obvious that it is connected with suffering. Oddly
enough, the term is not a gospel one - though it does appear in Acts
1:13, and 14:15 with the two senses in which Christians have continued
to use it over two thousand years: the Passion of the Lord on the one
hand, and human passions on the other. The religious sense of the
Passion of the Lord has its value as explained in theological
terms.
'Human passions', on the other hand, have had a rougher ride.
We moderns are children of the Enlightenment, and
'passion' was one
term which underwent major 'enlightenment'! Before that period,
from
the time of the Greeks (Aristotle, the Stoics...), passion was
something
people saw either positively (a deep power and energy, even rage, which
was the essence of, arousal of the dynamic human spirit), or negatively
(the Stoics saw it as suffering, in false belief). Hellenistic
philosophy in both Greece and Rome endowed language
with vocabulary elaborated on by the likes of Aquinas,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Kant, Hume and others. Allied to this
was
literature from Greek Tragedy to poets like Browning - and medical
science, rhetoric, ethics and so forth.
But then at a certain point the post-Enlightenment
shift to
feelings occurred, and much of what was passion was transferred to
emotions. The largely 20th Century shift from a vocabulary of
deep,
fundamental human passion to one of feelings, emotions, moods,
derailed high energy rage to low energy mood. By this stage we
were a
long way from The Iliad!
The Olympic Movement with its motto of
'multiple passions uniting sports, art and culture' at least tries to
recall this cultural memory: Turin's 'Passion lives here' was a
great slogan. The Rector Major linked it to us by sending his
Vicar to
Turin to carry the Olympic torch in our name.
It seems to me that the language of our Salesian
tradition as
represented by our Rector Major now, is intended to get us back on
track to high energy: 'passsion-DMA' belongs to our Salesian DNA.
It
is to our deepest levels and most heroic values that we are being led.
GLOSSARY
bard: poet
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