STEP 29 Dispassion - Growing Beyond our Passions
Dispassion - free from or unaffected by passion; devoid of personal feeling or bias; impartial; calm: a dispassionate critic. Detachment… the state or quality of being unemotional or uninvolved emotionally.
Freedom from passion; an undisturbed state of the mind; apathy- lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.
What happened on the Cross - We consider our Lord’s death on the cross to be a part of His entire ministry, which was accomplished from His incarnation till His ascension and subsequent sending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
What good is forgiveness if we do not change? Sin is painful – it hurts the soul. A forgiven sinner is still a sinner, and is sick. Jesus Christ came to enable us to stop sinning and become perfected.
When we look at the cross, we should see redemption, and not only forgiveness. The redeemed man changes, so that the sources of his pain are obliterated, and he obtains perfect peace. Our hymns bring this point home many times. We also speak of our Lord’s exploits on the cross in order to emulate Him. Just as He voluntarily gave Himself over to His Father’s will, so must we voluntarily give ourselves over to His will.
Dispassion is a difficult and technical theological term. The ascetic fathers have written many things about this term.
St. John Climacus "Love, dispassion, and adoption are distinguished by name, and name only. Light, fire, and flame join to fashion one activity. So too with love, dispassion and adoption."
St. Maximos the Confessor “Dispassion engenders love, hope in God engenders dispassion, and patience and forbearance engender hope in God; these in turn are the product of complete self-control, which itself springs from fear of God. Fear of God is the result of faith in God.”
Dispassion the Aim of All Asceticism
Saint Isaac the Syrian says, "Dispassion doesn't mean to no longer feel the passions, but to no longer accept them."
Diadochos of Photiki says, "Dispassion doesn't mean to be no longer be attacked by demons..., but being attacked by them, to remain unconquered."
Fr. Dimitru Staniloae summarizes, So dispassion would be that state of the soul in which it defeats every temptation.
This state is attained after much ascetic work and is a most positive strength capable of defeating every passion. It can also be seen as the possession of all the virtues.
In Step 29, St. John shows us the heights of spirituality - - the exalted state of dispassion.
By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart, which regards the artifice of the demons as a contemptible joke. A man is truly dispassionate - and is known to be such - when he has cleansed his flesh from all corruptions; when he has lifted his mind above everything created, and has made it master of all the senses; when he keeps his soul continually in the presence of the Lord and reaches out beyond the borderline of strength to Him. And there are some who would claim that dispassion is resurrection of the soul prior to that of the body, while others would insist that it is a perfect knowledge of God, a knowledge second only to that of the angels.
Dispassion is an uncompleted perfection of the perfect…. After entering this heavenly harbor, a man, for most of his earthly life, is enraptured, like someone already in heaven, and he is lifted up to the contemplation of God….
The man deemed worthy to be of this sort during his lifetime has God within him, to guide him in all he has to say or to think. The will of the Lord becomes for him a sort of inner voice through illumination. All human teaching is beneath him.
And when we listen to his descriptions, we have to admit that they are pretty amazing. It is hard for beginners in the spiritual life to imagine being cleansed of all corruption; it is equally as difficult to imagine being beyond all temptation of the flesh. It is truly hard to comprehend being master of one's senses. We may consider it a "good day" if we have not given in to our senses; if we have restrained them. It is a spiritually successful day if we have held our tongues when provoked by the misbehavior of others. Our whole lives are spent dealing with our passions and trying to restrain them. But what St. John is describing is quite different. He is talking about a spiritual state where the passions no longer exist!
Why does he lay this out before us? For at least two reasons: 1) to keep us from spiritual pride and 2) to motivate us to spiritual labor. It is easy for us to become complacent in our spiritual life, to be satisfied with what we have achieved and to lose the impetus to pursue more. This, of course, is a Satanic ploy, for the reality is that once we have stopped pursuing God we begin to lose what we have already gained. If we are not going forward in our spiritual lives, we can be certain that we are going backwards. It is equally easy for us to falsely assume that we are at the heights of our spiritual endeavor when we are yet at its beginning.
In this chapter, it is as if St. John is standing before us and proclaiming: "There is more! There is more!” Listen to his words:
"O my brothers, we should run to enter the bridal chamber of this palace, and if some burden of past habits or the passage of time should impede us, what a disaster for us!"
In another place he says:
"Brothers, let us commit ourselves to this, for our names are on the lists of the devout. There must be no talk of `a lapse', `there is no time,' or `a burden.' To everyone who has received the Lord in baptism, `He has given the power to become children of God.'" (John 1:12).
If we honestly observe ourselves, we will notice a sinful tendency to be satisfied with something less than dispassion. We grow weary of the struggle and we long to "be there" already. In our laziness we then lower the goal. We reduce holiness to a set of external rules; to a repeatable pattern of external behaviors.
Once we have lowered the goal, we then don't have to struggle as much. Once we have equated holiness with "external correctness" we can then feel good about ourselves. We can "be holy" and "feel good about ourselves" at the same time. We begin to say to ourselves, "I have not committed any major sins; nor do I place myself in situations of temptation"; "I am disciplined in my spiritual life - I have not broken my fast - I have kept the rule of prayer."
Soon we begin to see ourselves as authentic spiritual guides for others. We begin to compare ourselves with others and can even fancy ourselves as reliable judges of their holiness. And so without being aware of it, we have fallen into what is called prelest, or spiritual delusion.
St. John's words in this chapter are a wake-up call. They remind us of how far we are from spiritual perfection. They humble us. They motivate us. His words set the goal before us and promise that through our struggles, our attempts to deal with our own sin and controlling passions, by the grace of God, we are inch by inch, step by step, making it...His words set the goal before us. The goal is high: dispassion leading to illumination.
The height of the goal reaffirms the necessity of struggle. Nothing in this life comes easily. The more important it is, the more work it requires. These are facts of life. Thus, in our spiritual lives, when we are tempted to despair, to quit, to accept second best, to abandon the struggle, we must remind ourselves of just how wonderful the prize is.
St. John says: "Think of dispassion as a kind of celestial palace, a palace of the king of heaven."
This is where we must want to dwell. Getting there won’t be easy; it will require much work, struggle, and pain, but the promise reassures me that it is worth all of that. A small hut may be easier to attain, but it is not where those zealous for God and wish to be near him want to live. They have their eyes set on something more.
"Blessed dispassion raises the poor mind from the earth to heaven, raises the beggar from the dunghill of passion. And love, all praise to it, makes him sit with princes, that is with holy angels, and with the princes of God's people."
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