Kill the Passions, Not the Body: Abba Poemen 184

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, this year’s Lenten series will be on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. And we’re going to start today with something that should be very basic, but often gets lost in the shuffle: In our desire to ‘succeed’ at spirituality, the body is not our enemy.

This is an evergreen issue, for there’s always a temptation to want to do the biggest and best, for all the world to see. It should come as no surprise then, that this was also something that came up time and time again in the teachings of the Desert Fathers, a group of people famous for their extreme asceticism. But their teachings reject the idea of bigger and better in spirituality. This theme will come up a couple times in this series, but today I’d like to focus on one illustrative saying.

To set the scene, Abba Isaac stumbles upon Abba Poemen washing himself. This may not seem like a big deal by our standards, but there was some spiritual cachet in their world in not washing. The idea seems to have been that to take no heed to the body was a sign that one had transcended earthly things. But the wise Abba Poemen is having none of that. Here’s the story:

Abba Isaac came to see Abba Poemen and found him washing his feet. As he was free to speak to him as he liked, he said, ‘How is it that others practice austerity and treat their bodies hardly?’ Abba Poemen said to him, ‘We have not been taught to kill our bodies, but to kill our passions.’ (Poemen 184)

This touches on an important truth that has often been misplaced in Christianity. But it also needs to be unpacked a bit. Early Christianity inherited its understanding of morality and moral agency (our ability to choose between two courses of action) from its Greek philosophical context. As I’ve previously summarized this:

Stoic virtue ethics were grounded … in a lack of trust in our ability to see the world clearly, a state of affairs which, in their mind, leads to a loss of control and therefore to excess. They questioned the things people commonly chase after — pleasure, reputation, glory, riches — insisting that these are not good unless they are used well and for their proper function. The great fear for Stoics was of losing control over oneself and being carried away to excess by one’s desires for these things (called, ‘the passions’).

So ancient Christian texts use the word ‘passion’ very differently from us. When we read that our goal is to “kill our passions,” we think it’s talking about the things that excite us and give us joy. And that makes Christianity into a rather dour and depressing affair. But they’re not talking about this at all. Rather, for them, ‘the passions’ are the things over which we struggle to gain control, those bodily and psychological desires and appetites that confuse want and need, that distract us from our purpose, and make it hard to say ‘no’ (or conversely, hard to say ‘yes’, though that’s never been the focus of this line of thinking). The purpose of asceticism — practices like voluntary poverty, simplicity, and fasting — is to train ourselves to get a handle on these appetites so that we are free from being controlled by them.

I think this is actually a pretty wise approach, and one that is surprisingly consistent with a lot of today’s psychological modalities. But, as ever, humans are prone to misunderstanding and taking things too far. So, for example, instead of fasting to restrain and re-train our relationship to food, some monks took it to excess and starved the body, seeking to punish it for being an arena of sin. But again, as Abba Poemen points out here, this is not the correct approach. It’s about taming (or as he puts it here, ‘killing’) the passions, not the body. The body is not our enemy or something that can and should be ignored in the life of faith. In a very real way, we are our bodies. We do not come to God as disembodied souls, but as fully embodied persons.

So, no matter what our Lenten practices may be, this is a helpful reminder at the start of this season. When it comes to the life of faith, more isn’t better. The goal is never to harm ourselves — ever — but to train our bodies, minds, and hearts so that we can be freed from whatever it is that we struggle to say no to.