austraLasia
1523
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
________________________
AustraLasia is
an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also
functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome. For queries please contact
admin@bosconet.aust.com
For RSS feeds, subscribe to www.bosconet.aust.com/RSS/rssala.xml