Our venerable father John, whose memory we keep this day, instructs us thus: “Blessed dispassion lifts the mind that is poor from earth to heaven, and raises the beggar from the dunghill of the passions. But love, whose praise is above all, makes him sit with the princes, with the holy angels, and with the princes of the people of God” (The Ladder of Divine Ascent, step 29). Dispassion (apatheia) is, essentially, a negative virtue: it is a negation of our passionate attachment to the world. Love, on the other hand, is a positive: it fills our life with meaning and is the spiritual mechanism of our communion, our relationship, with God and with each other. Dispassion for its own sake may have some merit, but for Christians, it is not the highest goal: “the greatest of” all virtues “is love,” “for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God . . . because God is love” (1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Jn 4:7–8). We pursue dispassion precisely so that we can make room for the true, holy, divinizing, and divine love in our hearts and in our lives.
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