Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.1998, Qupperneq 47

Practice and Passion in Theology
hand, is pure emotion, uncontrolled, unpredictable, uninhibited; his devotees ex-
press emotion without restraint in ecstasy and orgy. For the Dionysian, the heart
must rule the head; for the Apollonian it is the other way round. And for each
there is a deity to correspond.
From the beginning Christianity found it hard to live at ease with this duality,
although an Apollonian emphasis has penetrated deep into the Christina tradi-
tion, as is shown in the repeated suggestions that feelings and emotions are
things to be controlled, and in the deep ambivalence about sexuality, to say
nothing of certain strands in the Christian ascetic tradition. ‘Any action, thought
or word which involves passion is out of harmony with Christ and bears the mark
of the devil, who makes muddy the pearl of the soul with passions and mars that
precious jewel’, wrote Gregory of Nyssa. In Christ is to be found the overcoming
of passion, for he is ‘the source of tranquillity’.3 This Apollonian attitude was
still powerful in my student days, when we were encouraged to read a book by
Leslie Weatherhead with the significant title, The Mastery of Sex. For the Apol-
lonian, sexuality is something to be controlled, mastered, repressed, sublimated
or brought into subjection because it is essentially dangerous, unruly, inimical to
an Apollonian Christianity.
But an Apollonian Christianity in which, in Gregory of Nyssa’s terms, ‘the
godhead is purity, freedom from passion, and separation from all evil’4 sits
uneasily with the gospel story. The Greek duality must be transcended. Thus
John’s gospel starts by applying to Jesus a term much loved of the Stoics, the
Logos, the rational principle of the universe dwelling in serenity to all eternity.
But this Logos acts, and his activity amounts to a practice. He went, like Diony-
sus (a similarity emphasised by Rudolph Bultmann), to a wedding party. He ex-
pressed throughout his ministry strong feelings of compassion, concern, anger
and even, at the end, desolation. His life, his practice, was a strange unity which
culminated in suffering, in a death very different from the orderly, dispassionate
death of Socrates. Pain, agony and forsakenness were the climax of his redemp-
tive practice.
I am not here making an apologetic point about practical theology, but rather
affirming the centrality of passion, in both the senses of that word, to an adequate
christology, and consequently the importance of passion in the Christina life.
The Christina God is not apathetic; neither should the God’s desciples be.
3 Gregory of Nyssa, On Christian Perfection. PG 46.283-286.
4 Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Beatitudes. Or. 6.
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