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
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
