The depth-psychology corpus treats 'passions' as one of its most contested and generative categories, traversing the full arc from ancient Stoic analysis through Orthodox ascetic theology to modern transpersonal psychology. Four major positions emerge. The Stoic strand, represented chiefly by Inwood's reconstruction of Chrysippus and Zeno, defines passions as cognitive misjudgements — assents to false propositions about value — rendering them simultaneously blameworthy and fully corrigible by reason; the four canonical passions (desire, fear, pleasure, distress) become indices of rational failure rather than irreducible affective forces. The Orthodox Philokalic tradition elaborates an entirely different taxonomy: passions are multi-layered disorders of the soul's faculties — incensive, appetitive, intellectual — seeded by demonic suggestion and flowering through progressive assent into sinful habit; yet this same tradition insists they are not sins per se but diseased conditions susceptible to transfiguration. A third position, developed in Welwood's transpersonal register, rehabilitates passion as unconditional resonance with life, a vehicle of surrender and awakening when freed from compulsive object-fixation. Finally, Ricoeur's philosophical survey treats the treatises on passions as the documentary record of humanity's attempt to describe attributable mental states in their universality. Across all positions, the question of whether passions are to be extirpated, redirected, or transformed remains acutely unresolved.
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31 substantive passages
Chrysippus in his work On Passions is said that the Stoics including Zeno identified the passion with a judgement… the passion may be said to be totally in the agent's control, since the opinion or judgement is the assent given to a proposition embodied in the presentation.
This passage establishes the Stoic cognitive thesis: passions are nothing other than false value-judgements, placing them squarely within the agent's rational and moral responsibility.
Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
Passions are the place, the seat of evil in the human person. The impassioned man...does not act on his own but is rather acted upon...he loses his personality, his personal identity. He becomes chaotic, with multiple faces, or rather—masks.
Florovsky's formulation, relayed through Coniaris, presents passions as the fundamental locus of depersonalisation and loss of freedom within the Orthodox anthropological framework.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis
The passions that pertain to the body differ from those that pertain to the soul; those affecting the appetitive faculty differ from those affecting the incensive faculty… But all intercommunicate, and all collaborate.
This passage provides the Philokalic systematic taxonomy of passions across bodily, appetitive, incensive, intellectual, and rational faculties, demonstrating their mutual implication and structural interconnectedness.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
Passions are not sins but sinful conditions or diseases that can develop into sins if we do not discipline them… Passions work in four stages—first, in the heart; secondly, in the face; thirdly, in words; and fourthly in evil deeds.
The Eastern patristic distinction between passion-as-condition and actual sin is articulated here, together with the four-stage developmental model that maps the passion's progressive colonisation of the person.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998thesis
Passion can take two very different forms. In its initial upsurge it radiates energy and fire, lifting us out of ourselves and generating powerful, fresh inspiration. Yet it can also be a force that leads us down into addiction and delusion.
Welwood establishes passion's constitutive ambivalence — as simultaneously a vehicle of awakening and a pathway into psychological enslavement — which organises his entire transpersonal analysis.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
Passion is a sensible activity of the appetitive faculty, depending on the presentation to the mind of something good or bad… passion is an irrational activity of the soul, resulting from the notion of something good or bad.
John of Damascus offers a systematic philosophical definition of passion as appetitive and cognitive event, rooting it in the soul's response to evaluative presentations and distinguishing it from pain as its sequela.
John of Damascus, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016thesis
Chrysippus and other Stoics did compare the weakness of character lying at the root of moral errors with a bodily disease… as it is applied to the stoic analysis of pathos the comparison has particular interest.
Inwood traces the Stoic medical analogy whereby the soul's disposition that generates passions is likened to bodily illness, situating Chrysippus within a therapeutic tradition reaching back to Plato.
Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
The first type of dispassion is complete abstention from the actual committing of sin… The fourth type of dispassion is the complete purging even of passion-free images; this is found in those who have made their intellect a pure, transparent mirror of God.
The Philokalia's four-tiered schema of dispassion charts a progressive interior path from behavioural restraint to complete purification even of passion-associated imagery, defining the telos against which the passions are measured.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995thesis
These eight passions should be destroyed as follows: gluttony by self-control; unchastity by desire for God and longing for the blessings held in store; avarice by compassion for the poor; anger by goodwill and love for all men.
The ascetic programme for countering each of the eight canonical passions with a specific antidotal virtue is enumerated, illustrating the Philokalic method of targeted spiritual therapeutics.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting
'Although the rational animal has a nature such as to use Reason in every situation and to be guided by it, we often turn our back on it, when we are subject to another more violent motion.'
Chrysippus's fragment on inconsistency reveals the Stoic paradox: reason is the natural guide of the rational being, yet passions constitute a 'more violent motion' capable of overriding it.
Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985supporting
The ultimate goal of passion is surrender. This is the heart's true desire. The fruition of sexual pursuit is the moment of orgasm, a moment of total letting go. The French call it 'the little death.'
Welwood argues that passion's deepest telos is not object-possession but self-surrender, reframing erotic and spiritual passion as homologous movements toward dissolution of the self-enclosed ego.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
Passion is, in essence, unconditional, because it is an immediate, unfabricated resonance with life, the life inside us connecting with the life outside. This resonance with reality is an essential constituent of our being.
Welwood ontologises passion as a fundamental mode of being-in-relation, distinguishing its original unconditional character from the conditional obsession that arises when the resonance is misattributed to a specific object.
Welwood, John, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
Fantasy is not wrought into an image, passion is not energized, without unperceived hidden demonic impulsion… the demons use the state of passion as an occasion for stirring up images.
The Philokalia presents passions as requiring demonic activation through fantasy, establishing a demonological psychology in which the passion-state serves as the demons' entry-point into the soul.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
It does not lie within our power to decide whether or not the passions are going to harass and attack the soul. But it does lie within power to prevent impassioned thoughts from lingering within us and arousing the passions to action.
This Philokalic passage makes the crucial moral-psychological distinction between the involuntary onset of passionate temptation and the culpable assent to it, structuring the ethics of inner vigilance.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 2, 1981supporting
First the memory brings some passion-free thought into the intellect. By its lingering there, passion is aroused. When the passion is not eradicated, it persuades the intellect to assent to it. Once this assent is given, the actual sin is then committed.
Maximos the Confessor's micro-phenomenology of passion's genesis — from neutral memory-image through arousal to assent to act — provides the standard Philokalic account of how passions consolidate into sin.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Categorizing and naming the swarm of passions that afflict the psyche was important to the Fathers of the Philokalia, since it was a precious tool of discernment. It enabled them to track the subtle workings of the passions.
The nomological project of the Philokalic Fathers — classifying passions as an instrument of spiritual discernment — is identified here as foundational to their entire psychology of the soul.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
It is clear that he who has self-love has all the passions… Some world religions, i.e., Buddhism and Hinduism are dedicated to the elimination of desire and passion.
Maximus's identification of self-love as the root that contains all other passions is set against Buddhist and Hindu strategies of total passion-elimination, foregrounding the cross-traditional debate on whether passions should be destroyed or transfigured.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
After being tamed and taught to graze like cattle, the passions can become savage once more through our negligence and regain the ferocity of wild beasts.
The Philokalic metaphor of tamed-then-re-wilded beasts captures the doctrine that spiritual vigilance must be perpetual, as partially subdued passions retain latent capacity for renewed ferocity.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting
'Those same things in whose presence we experience distress are objects of fear when they are impending and approaching… If the wise man should be open to distress, he would also be open to anger… and also to pity and envy.'
Nussbaum's reconstruction of Chrysippus demonstrates that the Stoic passions form an interconnected system: susceptibility to one opens the agent to the entire network of passionate responses.
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting
Stoic apatheia, and by implication the ideal of philosophical tranquillity… comes at too high a price: namely the radical extirpation of the passions that express our attachments to life and to others.
The anti-Stoic critique — that extirpation of passions severs the agent from constitutive human attachments — is articulated as a persistent tension in the philosophical tradition concerning passions and apatheia.
Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
Stoic apatheia, and by implication the ideal of philosophical tranquillity… comes at too high a price: namely the radical extirpation of the passions that express our attachments to life and to others.
Parallel to Ure's treatment, this passage crystallises the anti-Stoic objection that passion-extirpation deprives the sage of the affective bonds that constitute a genuinely human life.
Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
We never cease to add to the repertoire of thoughts… including cognitions, volitions, and emotions, whose meaning we understand without taking into account the differences between the persons to whom they are attributed. This is what is confirmed by the various treatises on the passions from book 2 of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
Ricoeur situates the treatises on passions within a broader philosophical tradition of describing attributable mental states in their universality, linking Aristotle's Rhetoric to Descartes and Spinoza.
These involuntary responses are not here attributed to impulses… they occur 'after the opinion that one' [has formed]… Seneca also says that they occur 'after the opinion that one'.
Inwood identifies an instability in the Stoic account of 'preliminary passions' — involuntary proto-affective reactions that neither fully qualify as passions nor as non-assented mere physical responses.
Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985supporting
The purification of the soul is release from the passions, and release from the passions gives birth to love.
This apophthegmatic formulation presents the release from passions not as a negative terminus but as the positive generative condition for the birth of divine love.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
By overcoming such longing and fear, together with the self-love which has engendered them, you have killed at a single blow all the passions which have come into being through them and from them.
Maximos presents self-love as the generative matrix of all passions, such that its conquest — through dispassion toward pleasure and pain — constitutes a comprehensive defeat of the entire passionate economy.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
There is something wrong down inside us. A monster threatens to destroy us. That monster consists of the passions which are described in detail by the Fathers of the Philokalia.
The loose-cannon parable figures the passions as an interior destructive force that, unless brought under discipline, threatens to destroy the soul from within — a vivid popularisation of the Philokalic anthropology.
Coniaris, Anthony M., Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
Distractive thoughts are the promptings of the demons and precursors of the passions… There can be no action, either for good or evil, that is not initially provoked by the particular thought of that action; for thought is the impulse.
The Sinai text establishes thought as the indispensable precursor of passion and action alike, grounding the Philokalic practice of nepsis (watchfulness over thoughts) in a psychology of impulse and passion.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
Nothing so destroys the state of inner stillness and takes away the divine power that comes from it as the following six universal passions: insolence, gluttony, talkativeness, distraction, pretentiousness and the mistress of the passions, self-conceit.
Gregory of Sinai identifies six 'universal passions' as specifically destructive of hesychast stillness, with self-conceit named their mistress — linking passion-psychology directly to the practice of interior prayer.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995supporting
If you wish to master your thoughts, concentrate on the passions and you will easily drive the thoughts arising from them out of your intellect.
Maximos offers a practical reversal of direction in inner work: rather than combating thoughts directly, the practitioner should address the underlying passion from which the thoughts are generated.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979aside
The intellect of a man who enjoys the love of God does not fight against things or against conceptual images of them. It battles against the passions which are linked to them.
Maximos clarifies that the spiritual struggle is never against external objects or their images per se, but against the passionate entanglement that the intellect forms with those objects.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside
If one passion finds a place in you and takes root there, it will introduce other passions also into the same shrine. For even though the passions, as well as their instigators the demons, are opposed to each other, yet they are all at one in seeking our perdition.
The systemic interdependence of the passions — that each entrenched passion opens the door to others despite their mutual opposition — underscores the Philokalic insistence on vigilance against any single passion gaining a foothold.
Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 4, 1995aside