Passion and createdness

Anatolios ( Retrieving Nicaea: The Development and Meaning of Trinitarian Doctrine ) offers this neat “Well, duh” summary of Nyssa’s reconceptualization of human passions. Hellenic philosophy made passibility both an ontological and a moral category. Passions were “disordered affections” but these disordered affections were built into a “finite material existence that rendered a nature passive to external forces.” Disordered, morally condemnable responses then are built into material existence.

Nyssa realized that this can’t be right and so “he sunders the conflation of ontological and moral connotations attached to the language of ‘passions,’ a conflation that tended to assign negative moral value to the very structure of corporeal human existence.” He thus reserves the term “passion” for “willful moral failure.” As Gregory himself puts it, “nothing is truly passion which is not conducive to sin . . . only the diseased condition of the will is truly passion.” The Word did not partake of passions in this sense, even though “he did partake of all the structural conditions of finite corporeal human existence, including the emotions that arise naturally and faultlessly from these conditions.”