Angelic Seeing

Passions of the Soul
by rowan williams
bloomsbury, 160 pages, $15

These reflections, gentle but piercing in their spiritual psychology, were originally given as an Easter retreat for the Community of the Holy Cross, an Anglican Benedictine convent, in 2018. With typical deftness, Rowan Williams both channels the insights of the Desert Fathers and quietly extends the defense of classical theism that he offered in Christ: The Heart of Creation, written around the same time. As I noted in First Things (“Briefly Noted,” April 2020),

many contemporary theologians argue that we need to rethink the classical account of God, since the divine perfections (impassibility, immutability, etc.) are foreign to Scripture and keep God at a distance from our suffering.

Against this view, Williams argues that the classical metaphysical conception of God delivers us from a theology in which God is merely another being in the universe competing with human agency.

Classical Christology, Williams believes, presents a more liberating picture. The union of God and man in Jesus is something greater than the initial relation between Creator and creature. It allows Christians to reconcile with God and to participate in Christ’s work of drawing all things to the Father through himself. The finite, mortal, and suffering Jesus,

in releasing into the world the act of the Creator, in new forms of relation and possibility, makes clear once and for all that creation’s wholeness and fulfillment are realized . . . by the bringing into being within creation of the relatedness of the Word to the Father which is the eternal ground of all finite existence.

Williams goes on to show what this metaphysic looks like when lived out in prayer and discipleship. Creation exists because God desires to share his joy and love with other beings that are not God. The Gospel of John describes this gift as beholding divine glory; John goes on to show that the glory of God in the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ looks very different from the glory of man.

Christian writers came to locate our capacity for seeing and sharing in divine glory in the nous, a word frequently translated as “mind” but capturing more than our rational capacities. Williams defines nous as

the ‘instinct’ in us for seeing and loving what’s real and what’s true; a taste for the real, a kind of magnetic turning towards the real. And this means that nous is that capacity at the very centre of our being for turning Godwards, since God is what is unconditionally real.

The task of Christian spirituality, then, is to keep our nous directed toward God and away from things that are less real, to keep it from inclining toward things that would take God’s place.

Before attaining a contemplative vision of God in this life—let alone the beatific vision in the next—we need to learn how to see ourselves and the rest of creation truthfully. Evagrius Ponticus describes three ways of seeing: angelic, diabolic, and human. Williams elaborates:

The angelic way of seeing things is seeing things just as they are, just as they emerge from the hand of God, we might say—an almost Zen-like clarity, perceiving the world in its simple thereness, resting on nothing but the creative act of God, glowing in its reality. The diabolic way of seeing the world is the opposite—the world of a kind of supermarket consumerism in which we experience and assess what is around us simply in terms of its profitability to us, as if it had no meaning except what our wants and fantasies projected on to it: never mind what it is, what can it do for me? And the “human” way oscillates between these two, wobbling between the extremes, trying hard to see things straight but constantly slithering back into the self-referring mode of perception—stuffing the world into the bag of the ego.

The problem with maintaining angelic seeing lies in the passions. Passions are our collection of instincts, desires, reactions, and mechanisms for coping with the fact that we are dependent and finite. We cannot live without the passions; we need to acquire things for our own survival, defend ourselves from harm, love and be loved, and bring children into the world. But we also need to understand the passions and order them toward true goods.

The Desert Fathers see temptation as beginning with a probole or prompt. “That’s interesting,” we think, and begin to turn the impulse over in our minds. These impulses tend to collect as logismoi, swirling clouds of thoughts that ensnare us. Frequently our temptations are tied up with our fascination with ourselves, a process Tolstoy masterfully depicts in Anna Karenina when different characters treasure the “specialness” of their thoughts and feelings. “We are all rather liable to find ourselves interesting in this lightly novelistic way,” Williams observes, “and it is a major problem to overcome if we are to be free.” When we consent to sin, we reject the truth and lose our freedom, becoming trapped by the passions and the logismoi they have produced.

The Desert Fathers are very serious about sin, Williams argues, but very compassionate about it as well. Freedom from passion lies in truthful love, rooted in baptism, the sacraments, and life in Christian community. The purpose of the saving work of Christ and the gift of the Spirit is “the conquest of passion,” refocusing our vision through the lens of the truth. Hence the life of freedom from passion is apatheia—not apathy in the contemporary sense but a vision of the truth unclouded by the passions.

We should, then, strive to see clearly our interior life and inclinations, but not obsess about them. The Desert Fathers urge us not to memorize a list of sinful acts, but to examine those acts’ psychological roots. Be aware of your sins, face them, and give them to God with as little drama and fascination as possible. As a holy Anglican priest once told me, penitence means acknowledging our sin but not obsessing over it, keeping our enduring focus on God and his love.

In classical moral theology, the passions arise from the appetites, which are categorized as irascible or concupiscible. Williams never uses those terms but identifies two “bundles of instinct or reactive habit”: aggression, which pushes the world away, and desire, which consumes it. He then pairs the Desert Fathers’ eight “passions of the soul” with the eight beatitudes. This kind of numerical patterning is common in spiritual writing, as with Hugh of St. Victor’s treatise On the Five Sevens (the seven deadly sins, the seven petitions of the Our Father, and so on), but Williams’s pairing is distinct and, to my knowledge, unique—an exercise in patristic thinking for our own time.

He begins, of course, with pride. Humility accepts the metaphysical truth that God is our life—“We are because God is”—and there’s nothing we can do about it; pride rages against that same truth. In Genesis 2, God breathes life into Adam, and Williams uses that image as a point of connection with the first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The poor in spirit accept their own ontological dependence on God; they know that they breathe because he gave them the breath of life.

Acedia—a listlessness or torpor, often identified with sloth, that etymologically means a lack of care—has been identified by R. J. Snell, R. R. Reno, and others as the characteristic vice of our time. Williams, too, connects it to postmodern apathy. Beneath our daily fantasies, he identifies a habit of protecting ourselves from the uncertainty and boredom that come of living as finite, dependent creatures. Choose truth over fiction, he counsels; brave the boredom and leave the fantasy. He pairs his treatment of acedia with “blessed are those who mourn”: Mourning is the proper Christian response to evils we cannot change. Acedia recoils from the pain of living with and caring for an imperfect world, but only those who care are capable of mourning.

In that mourning, Williams writes, we express “our trust in Christ’s freedom to be alongside all suffering and to transfigure the damaged world.” According to a biographical account of St. Dominic, one of his companions once awakened to find the saint praying over and over: “Lord, what will become of sinners?” To guard against apathy or hatred, we should lament the rejection of the truth we are trying to preach.

Later, Williams considers the passion of lust alongside “blessed are the pure in heart” to explore the patristic understanding of desire. In Daniel 10, the Septuagint renders a Hebrew idiom for “Daniel, greatly beloved” literally, as “Daniel, man of desires.” Why is Daniel praised for having desires? Williams, following Gregory of Nyssa, writes:

For Gregory, desire never leaves us, simply because there cannot be anything that finally satisfies us. We are so constituted that we are always in need of fulfillment, never attaining it in the sense of possessing what we most deeply need. If we are growing in spiritual maturity and discernment, what we desire is always to go on growing and to go on desiring. The mistake is to want to stop wanting—to desire to be satisfied so that I shall not have to desire any more, because I now have what before I lacked.

In his Confessions, Augustine famously writes that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The picture we tend to get from that is one of a quest coming to a satisfied end. Gregory’s conception is different. Heaven, for Gregory, is a state of endlessly desiring God more and more—and being more and more satisfied. In the penultimate chapter of C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, “Further Up and Further In,” the children proceed from one delight to the next, each a deeper joy than the last. This is the satiety that God desires for us.

Apatheia is a matter not of extinguishing desire but of focusing it on the One for whom it was made. And as Williams shows, the challenge is to accept our finitude and dependence in light of his love and, with the help of grace, learn to keep our minds trained toward what is most real. Sound metaphysics should lead to our spiritual liberation: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Nathaniel Peters is director of the Morningside Institute.

Image by Gustave Doré, public domain. Image cropped.