The Most Important Lesson from the Fathers

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]I've spent much of the last seven years trying to immerse myself in the teachings of the church fathers. And in this video, I'll be talking about one of the most valuable things I've learned from them. But let me back up for a second. Most evangelicals don't grow up reading the church fathers. And the reasons for that are complex, and honestly, it's a story for another day.

[00:00:18]But at the very least, I'll say that it was certainly the case in my experience.

[00:00:22]And this lack of exposure can create certain blind spots in our theology. Now look, it doesn't mean you can't be a good theologian if you're not spending all your waking hours studying Petristics. But it is often the case that when we ignore the fathers, we rob ourselves of deep riches. When I first stumbled across the fathers in my undergrad days, it was like equal parts exhilarating and disorienting. And as I started reading as much as I could, I quickly noticed that there was one thing that they talked about, frankly, all the time that I had just never heard people talk about in the evangelical church that I grew up in, nor even in the Protestant Bible college I was attending at the time. I was intrigued. Some of what they were saying made sense, but other parts felt like just completely counterintuitive. I wasn't sure if it was just a difference in language and vocabulary or if it was something more, if it pointed to something deeper and more along the lines of a radically different vision of the spiritual life.

[00:01:22]Now, after studying the fathers all this time, I think it's actually a bit of both. The topic that the fathers constantly talked about that I had rarely heard mentioned was this, the passions. And the more I've studied this, the more I think it's something that the churches I grew up in, and frankly really just all churches for that matter, desperately need. So what are the passions? Well, growing up in America, we're constantly told to pursue our passions, to go to college and study what we're passionate about, and to cultivate passion for the things we do.

[00:01:55]This view of passion wasn't just like passed on by our school guidance counselors. It was also present in our churches. We were told to have a passionate faith in pursuit of Christ.

[00:02:04]For the most part then passion was spoken about positively. Then when I read the fathers, I often heard them talk about the passions plural, not passion singular. That was odd enough.

[00:02:15]But then I was told that the passions were bad and that the goal of the Christian life was apaththea or dispassion. And needless to say, that was a bit disorienting. So what's going on here? At this point, again, we should ask whether this is simply the result of a difference in language. As I said at the beginning, I do think that's part of the picture, but I don't think that's all of it either. We'll start with the language difference, then go to the substantive difference and what this means for the spiritual life. Spoiler alert, I think it can make a huge impact in your walk with Christ. So, we need to understand both of these parts to really grasp the wisdom of the fathers on this.

[00:02:54]Now, in modern parlance, passion usually refers to something like deep-seated emotions or inclinations. So, when we're told to pursue our passion, what we mean is like do the things you love, that resonate in your soul, that you are emotionally moved toward. By a passionate faith, we mean something like a faith that reaches all the way down to the deep desires of your heart. You can think of GK Chesterton's famous saying, "Let your religion be less a theory and more a love affair." And you might be in the right ballpark for what we mean by passion in the modern sense. Part of the confusion is that this is most definitely not what the fathers meant when they talked about the passions of the soul. The fathers could speak of the passions in multiple ways. On the one hand, they could refer to them neutally as like reactive instincts which are natural and blameless. Speaking of this broader neutral sense of the passions, Rowan Williams summarizes the petristic view as follows. For the Eastern Christian writers, passion is the whole realm of instinct, reaction, coping mechanisms. We cannot live without these things if we are to be human at all.

[00:03:58]Yet, unless we understand and in some degree transfigure them, we are trapped in something less than human. On the other hand, the fathers often spoke about the passions rather negatively. In this sense, the passions are the domain of our fallen, corrupted, sick wills, desire for those things that are contrary to God. Look at how St. Maximus the Confessor describes them. A culpable passion is an impulse of the soul that is contrary to nature. Simple enough for Maximus. The soul should be naturally drawn to God. But because of the sickness of sin, passions draw the soul toward that which is not God, that which we were not designed for. Now, more often than not, when the fathers speak about the passions, they're talking about them in this narrower, more negative sense. With that in mind, we can begin to see why the fathers thought that being dispassionate was actually a good thing, paradoxical as that may sound to us today. To make this more concrete, we can look at a few examples.

[00:04:57]Some of the most common things labeled as passions are things like greed, pride, envy, sloth, etc. Now, there are passions of the body and passions of the soul. Passions that lead to others and passions that are downstream from others. Now, if the fathers loved anything, it was making these kind of taxonomies of the passions, grouping them together and figuring out how they related. And by this point, it should be clear that what the fathers meant by passions and what we usually mean by this are not the same thing. It's tempting then to stop there, say, "Oh, look, this is just different conceptual vocabularies." And say, "I guess when the fathers speak about passions, they're just using like a different word for sins or vices." That way we can try to make what's unfamiliar in the fathers suddenly feel familiar to us. But tempting as that is, I think it would be a mistake. You see, even after I realized that part of my confusion with the fathers was a difference in language, I went on to appreciate the fact that the differences don't just stop there. The linguistic differences are just kind of the tip of the iceberg.

[00:05:58]And below the surface, I found the fathers pointing toward a vision of the spiritual life that is deeply rich and simultaneously foreign and familiar.

[00:06:07]More than that though, I realized it was something that spoke to my soul and something that I needed. Chances are you might too. I really think it's something that all Christians from all traditions can benefit from. Now, I'm not going to argue in this video that the petristic vision is completely lacking in modern Protestantism and that to get it, you need to become Orthodox or something like that, but I will argue that the fathers offer a deep well of insight that often hasn't been emphasized and from which Protestants can gain a great deal. So, now that we've flagged the difference in language and touched briefly on what the passions are, I want to really get into the meat of what this reveals about the spiritual life. But first, a quick word of thanks for my patrons. It's because of my patrons that I'm able to do this work full-time and bring you videos like this. Videos that take lots of time, energy, research, and effort to put together to bring you the best content I can. Now, my goal with this channel is to help introduce people to beauty, truth, and goodness, and the Christian tradition. And if you're passionate about that and you want to help this channel reach more people, you can help support by going to patreon.com/gospsimplicity.

[00:07:14]When you do, you get all types of fun perks like my book club where we read the church fathers together. You get to book office hours with me where we can talk about whatever you want. And then there's all types of other things like PDF downloads I've put together to help people study the fathers and others that you can get through my Patreon. Again, that's patreon.com/gosspelsimplicity.

[00:07:34]All right. For the fathers, understanding and transforming the passions is absolutely central to the spiritual life. Now to understand this we should zoom out for a second to see their overall picture of spiritual formation. Now fundamentally the fathers saw theosis union with God becoming God as the goal of the Christian life. Now we are created in the image of God and we are to grow ever more into his likeness mirroring him in our heart soul mind and strength and becoming united to him such that we are in the language of Peter partakers of the divine nature.

[00:08:09]But there's a problem. Sin has caused our souls, which should naturally desire God, to turn away from God. Now, in this state, our souls have become overcome by passions. However, there's good news.

[00:08:22]The eternal second person of the Trinity took on flesh, uniting humanity and divinity in himself so that we might be personally reunited to God. This only happens by the grace of God. It's important to recognize that. And yet, as we all know, the Christian life is a process of sanctification, and it's a long one. So, we must continually strive to be conformed to the image of God by the renewing of our minds. Now, this too, it's important to recognize again, is only possible by God's grace. But it does take real effort from us as well.

[00:08:53]Central to this long striving is transforming and healing the passions so that our souls are once more liberated to pursue that which they naturally desire, God. Okay, that's the map we're working with. And with that big picture in mind, we can begin to make better sense of why the fathers are so fixated on the passions in their writings. Now, if we're going to understand the details of the father's teaching on the passions, the first thing we should note is that the passions are distinct from sin. They reach further back than that really. The father saw sinful actions as the culmination of an internal process that has multiple steps. Though different writers kind of cash this out in slightly different ways. The basic theme is that there's an an initial provocation or temptation. Now that is not sinful in itself. We are told after all that Christ was tempted and yet was without sin. But temptation can give way to fixation or what some of these writers call coupling. Rowan Williams describes this phase as a person saying, "What a complicated and interesting person I must be to have these impulses." In this phase, you're letting the impulse kind of stick around within you. While not always sinful, it is often unwise. It is easy for this to kind of breed in us a certain fascination with ourselves that is often unhealthy. The next step, though, is ascent. Now, at this phase, we're allowing that initial impulse that we've begun to turn over in our mind to really make a home within us. and we often begin to delight in it. And then once we are delighting in that soon we are captive to it. Let's make this a little more concrete. Take anger for instance.

[00:10:31]Now having an angry impulse might not be bad. Depending on the context, it might even be necessary for keeping you alive.

[00:10:38]But after that initial impulse, we might begin to turn the anger over in our mind and really think about it. This is that stage of coupling. Then we start to like the anger that's simmering in us. That's ascent. Before we know it, we're a slave to it. That's captivity. As captives to it, we often then engage in sinful actions through our uncontrolled anger.

[00:11:03]The point here isn't that the concrete actions are the only form of sin.

[00:11:07]They're not. But when the fathers speak about the passions, they have a much broader view of things in mind than just our deeds. The deeds are just the end of that process. The passions encompass a whole range of internal struggles. Which leads to our next point. If the passions are not just deeds, but instead relate to inner struggle, then we must understand the domain in which they take place. That is, we've got to understand our souls. Now, most of us have a fairly nebulous view of the soul. In some ways, that's just the result of living in a modern, disenchanted, and materialistic world. But it's also because the soul is spoken of in myriad ways, both in scripture and in tradition, which can make things a little confusing. For today's purposes, I think it's helpful to recognize that one of the main ways the father spoke about the soul, especially in relation to the passions, is that it's something with either three powers or divided into three parts.

[00:12:04]These three parts are the intellectual, the spirited, and the desiring. You might also hear this called the rational, appetitive, and insensive.

[00:12:14]Same idea in both. The fathers didn't come up with this on their own. Long before them, Plato offered this same division and described the intellect as like a human within a human, the spirited part of you, as like a lion within you, and the desiring as like a manyheaded beast within you. For Plato and the Republic, for instance, justice is all about getting those parts to work together. Now, if these kind of platonic roots are making you a little uncomfortable, I'd encourage you to step back a second and just think of how this maps onto human experience. I mean, is it not the case that within ourselves, there's often a voice of reason that's at war with our more base desires and then maybe between those we find our will that can really swing in either direction. If that resonates with you, then essentially you're getting the main idea here. I've personally found this to be a very helpful diagnostic and the fathers kind of build on this to say that there are passions that map on to each of these parts of the soul. Each part has a desire of its own. But the problem is frequently these desires kind of get out of whack. As Paul says, we become slaves to our stomachs, letting our bodily desires get the upper hand of say our reason. Seeing these divisions of the soul and the passions unique to each part allows us to more accurately see what cure is needed. For instance, why do we fast? Well, we do that to control the passions of the body. To control that manyheaded beast of the appetitive part of us. Why do we practice obedience? To train the will to tame that lion inside of us. Why do we pray? To fixate the mind on its proper end rather than being distracted by useless thoughts. Now, I find this to be really interesting because in therapy circles today, there's an idea called internal family systems, which is quite popular. It's kind of this way of seeing within yourself almost a community of persons. And a lot of people find this really helpful. But what's interesting to me is that without being exactly the same, in some ways, this view of the soul as kind of having waring parts within it is almost predating and anticipating this like thousands of years before we've been talking about in this way. That's not to say they're the same, but it is to say that there is deep wisdom in this and that we can see overlaps in how we're approaching psychology today. Now, the practical payout here is absolutely huge. With St. Paul, we often are asking ourselves, why are we doing the things we don't want to do? And the answer from the fathers is that our passions are at war within us.

[00:14:40]There's a part of us that wants that, but there's another part that doesn't.

[00:14:44]And we struggle to get that under control. This war of the passions stems from the fact that different parts of our soul just desire different things in this sick and disoriented state in which they are after the fall. But ultimately the goal is to transform the passions to transform these desires and align them so that we are all freed to desire that which is good and true and beautiful that which we are created for. Which brings us to our last point for the fathers. All this talk about the passions leads up to the idea that the goal is to attain dispassion. Again, if you have the Disney version of passion in your mind, the follow your dreams version of passion, this sounds just terribly unexiting. When we hear dispassion, we're tempted to think that the goal is to just like, I don't know, not care about anything. After all, the word often translated here is apaththea.

[00:15:39]And we think of apathy as staring blankly at glowing screens and just giving that Gen Z stare of nothing matters, a certain nihilism. But that is not what Christian petristic apathy is.

[00:15:52]For the fathers, apathy is actually deeply connected to love. As Rowan Williams beautifully puts it, love is what happens when you stop being aggressive and greedy and stop to look with your whole self from the center of who you are. To understand that, I've got to reiterate again that the fathers believe our souls were created to desire God. This is a fundamental anthropological point for them. Our truly natural state is to do that which God wants us to do to delight in God. So when we are freed from the sinful passions, it's not as though we then just like sit still. It's not a mere negative freedom, a freedom from sin.

[00:16:38]It's a positive freedom, a freedom for something. And this is really important.

[00:16:43]So when we looked at the passions and how they relate to sin, the this understanding of the passions allowed us to reach further back to go beyond the surface layer, right? And drill deeper than a mere focus on sinful actions. So too does understanding dispassion allow us to stretch further forward to reach higher than just sin management.

[00:17:05]Understanding dispassion leads to a liberation of our souls so that we can move toward God unimpeded by the sickness of sin. And ultimately that is the path to theosis. Now I want to end by drawing out just a few more kind of quick implications of this before ending with some recommendations for going deeper if you want to. The first is that the spiritual life is a lifelong journey. We're often tempted to think that Christianity is just like cleaning up the big sins or worse just cleaning up the sins that people can see. But that would be to miss the radical nature of Jesus teaching. All throughout the sermon on the mount, Jesus calls us to move inward to look beyond the surface actions of sin and go to the disorder that is in our soul lurking under the surface. Once we begin to see that, we see that the passions are not something we can clean up quickly in the way that one might, I don't know, stop swearing or start going to church. It's a long process. One in which the more we learn of ourselves, the more we realize we have so much more to grow in. Now, the second implication is important, especially for those that struggle with scrupulosity, and it's this. Don't become self-obsessed. It's a tricky balance admittedly between being aware of yourself and being obsessed with yourself. Now awareness is vital, but being obsessed with ourselves is to give the passions just more power than they deserve. Remember, we don't fight on our own. We do this by grace and that grace should bring assurance. Metropolitan Hirotheos says one should not be agitated in the spiritual struggle.

[00:18:51]Agitation is very harmful to the soul.

[00:18:54]Remember that ultimately Christ has already won. And I actually think here some of Protestantism's emphasis on the joy of knowing Christ can actually be really helpful. Yes, the Christian life is a struggle, but it's also a joy in knowing that we are beautifully and utterly dependent on God. This is the message of blessed are the poor in spirit after all. So while we need to know ourselves, we don't want to be so obsessed with the passions that we give the passions the center stage rather than ultimately remembering what all of this is for, which is to seek Christ.

[00:19:30]Now, if you're worried about getting this balance of awareness and obsession incorrect, you should heed another point of the fathers, and that's this. Don't go alone. The third practical implication is the need for a spiritual father or mother, a spiritual director to guide you on this path. Someone who can give you direction and help you see what you're blind to. The fathers absolutely did not see this as a solo sport, just a type of self-help program.

[00:19:58]It was something that was ecclesial, something that we did within the life of the church, and also something deeply relational, something that we are guided in and through with the help of someone who is spiritually wiser than us, who can help us discern that which we can't see. And we need that. So finding someone who can help you, look, it might take time, it might be difficult, but the fathers insist that this is a crucial piece of the puzzle. So don't overlook it. Finally, I want to mention one other practical point that should really be the fruit of these other ones.

[00:20:32]And I think this is seen most clearly in the desert fathers who perhaps understood this teaching better than anyone else. It's this an awareness of your own passions should lead to a radical posture of non-judgment toward others. Again, this isn't just like esoteric teaching of the mystics. This is really just like the sermon on the mount. Judge not, lest you shall be judged. and the with the measure you use it shall be measured against you. That might ring a bell. A mark of spiritual immaturity is a fixation on the sins of others. A mark of spiritual maturity is saying with St. Paul of sinners I am the worst. As Abu Macccarius, one of the desert fathers said, "If you do no harm to others and do not judge anyone, then you can be saved." So let us not be like the Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like the others who got a little progress in the spiritual life and used that as something to judge other people but rather let us be like the tax collector who made more genuine progress in the spiritual life by saying Lord have mercy on me a sinner. All right I hope this has been helpful for you all.

[00:21:40]Understanding the passions and the role they play in the spiritual life has been really impactful for me. And once you see this, I think you'll be able to make better sense of the spiritual teaching of the church fathers. And hopefully more than just understanding stuff, you'll actually be able to live it out.

[00:21:57]If you're like me, when you come across an exciting idea, one thing you want to do is you want to go find books to read more about this and to go deeper. So, if you enjoyed this, there are several places you can go to learn more. But please bear in mind that this isn't really about information acquisition so much as it is about spiritual transformation translation. Put these things into practice. Don't just read about them.

[00:22:20]That being said, I found a few books really quite helpful and would be a good place to start. First, you've got Rowan Williams Passions of the Soul. Now, this is just a great ecumenical introduction.

[00:22:31]And he does a really interesting thing where he compares the kind of eight main passions from a vagrias list with the eight biatitudes and shows the biatitudes as kind of this undoing of the passions. Really fascinating stuff.

[00:22:44]Rowan Williams is amazing. Love him.

[00:22:47]Recommend the book. Okay. The second is from Metropolitan Hirotheos and it's Orthodox Psychotherapy. Now admittedly this is a lot less ecumenical but a highly helpful synthesis of the tradition and especially a synthesis of the eastern fathers and the teaching of the filocalia which if you enjoyed the first two books you should dive into eventually. The filia is a translation roughly of like the love of beauty. Um but it takes together these spiritual teaching on prayer mainly in kind of the aesthetic life uh from church fathers throughout the centuries and puts them together in a way that's been central to kind of eastern monasticism and is an absolute treasure trove of information.

[00:23:30]Now, some of it's difficult to make it through, not necessarily because of um being like intellectually too difficult, but because it's written for aesthetics mainly, and it's often set in a world that just feels very foreign to us. But there is such incredible depth and richness there, and it's worth waiting into eventually. But I would start with those first two books before this as they're kind of synthesizing that tradition, giving you some of the tools to make sense of it before you wait into it yourself. And then finally, I am always happy to recommend The Desert Fathers. They give you kind of the condensed and memorable teachings and stories of people actually living this out. And man, if I was on a desert island, one of the books I'd want to take with me are The Desert Fathers because there's just such depth of richness and I I absolutely love the Desert Fathers. So, those are just a few recommendations. Anyway, I hope this video has been helpful for you guys.

[00:24:24]Thanks so much and God bless.