Index of my writings on thymos and epithymia
Curating an experience through the rhizome
Like a pesky house cat, the need for a single place to direct people when they ask me about thymos and epithymia keeps pushing itself into my face and tickling the back of my neck. It’s time I get up and feed the darn thing — er, the sweet thing. I do love it so.
I’ve written about the lower passions of thymos and epithymia and their polarized relationship in many scattered places. I’ve always been pleased to write about it rhizomatically, mimicking the lateral patterns of thought evident in the writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, my primary teacher in such things. That means creating a network of related articles with no one throughline. When one, to the contrary, writes a systematic treatise on something, it gets reified as a monolithic object of thought. The result is an abstraction. It can serve as a helpful tool in some ways perhaps, but this method is inconvenient when what one wishes to express is no abstraction but the pattern of life as it is lived. For that purpose, continually returning to a topic, never with the ambition of summarizing it, always looking at it from different angles, works well. The YouTube channel of Jonathan Pageau (also a student of St. Maximus) functions this way. When someone asks where to begin watching his videos, it’s hard to know what to recommend. I don’t know, just scroll through the archive and pursue whatever piques your interest. It’s built to have multiple points of entry into the heart of the author’s symbolic mode of thinking, on which there is no singular video.
Such is how I’ve gone about writing on the topic of thymos and epithymia, the repulsive and attractive powers of the soul. The obvious disadvantage to having multiple points of entry, however, is that people requiring curation can give up and opt never to enter at all. So here’s my attempt at curation. Although I don’t plan on writing a treatise on this topic, maybe we can have it both ways a little.
My first attempts to explain the idea of thymos and epithymia were on Letterboxd in the form of movie reviews. I’m not going to go strictly chronologically here, however. Let’s start on Substack, where the bulk of the relevant material is. In just my second post here I broached the subject by way of mourning the death of musician Mimi Parker. Naturally embedded in certain songs of her band Low is the dialectic of desire and anger. Looking at this pattern through the prism of artistic expression proves especially helpful.
That’s the first link I’ll give because it’s an important starting point for me. If not for this next piece’s lack of seniority, however, it instead would be the first link I’d list. I had long been fascinated by a scene in the 1995 Chinese movie Blush, directed by Li Shaohong. Li’s dramatization of a particular kind of gender conflict within a marriage serves as a model, I’ve found, for many instances of strife in this broken world of ours, ranging from the interior life of an individual to the clash of empires.
A few weeks after that big piece I followed it up with one of my most important, most patristic treatments of this topic. Mostly to this point I had been describing the negative, fallen aspects of the passions, but here I write about how they are properly to be used, and how they are transformed for good in Christ. I can rely less on my own experience to describe these patterns, which is why I rely heavily on the sources of revelation within the Church — and not just Church Fathers. I finish the piece with a commentary on St. Paul’s whole armor of God in Ephesians 6, which should be of interest to those primarily concerned with how these Greek philosophical concepts are at all biblical (they’re very biblical, from the longing and lording of Gen. 3:16 to the whore and the beast in Rev. 17). Also, in the course of writing this piece, I created a long, public Google Doc collecting quotations from St. Maximus the Confessor that mention thymos and epithymia.
Those are three foundational pieces. But on those foundations I’ve built a lot of other cool stuff. Gender conflict proves a powerful fascination in our hypersexed world — writing about it drives up the page views. Two of my most read articles on Substack are my Barbie essay (in which I deliberately eschew all talk of thymos and epithymia, taking a different angle on the topic) and this next one I’ll list, which treats the topics of male disposability, feminine ridicule, and the nature of epithymetic violence. This is an important one, with a lot of helpful analogies, like Scylla and Charybdis, sword and famine, and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Before I get too far away from the positive deployment of the passions, though, I want to list this next piece, a more personal reflection which represents some of the best things I’ve been blessed to say through my writing. Its success spawned a short series named after it, “Converting desire on YouTube,” in which I look at the work of feminine Orthodox YouTubers Michaela Nikolaenko and Jasmyne Theodora; unfortunately the series has stalled out after just the two entries. But here’s the original piece that inspired them:
Judging by the title of this next piece, you’d be forgiven if you thought my political treatise was a reversion into concentrating solely on the corruptive modes of the passions. There is that, in plenty, but I manage to write a bit also about positive solutions to the passions. Like masculine and feminine, and like political right and left, anxiety and depression too are patterned after thymos and epithymia. And thus so too are their antidotes prayer and fasting, as well as selfless works of charity (for the depressed) and enchantment by beauty (for the anxious). Yes, I was pleasantly surprised to find a use for the word “enchantment”. If you’re here for the psychology and think a political treatise would be a distraction from that, that’s not my angle at all. Politics is downstream from psychology. But of course Plato taught us that a long time ago.
Now I want to mix it up and run through a slew of pieces in which I make meaningful remarks concerning the pattern of thymos and epithymia. In the second part of that political treatise (above), I name a number of ways in which the lower passions play out both in the world formed by souls so polarized, as well as in the contemplative life of said souls. It begins with the longing and lording named in Gen. 3:16 as consequent to sin and then spreads out to many different facets. I first had cause to discuss this longing and lording in the course of my wider argument against a dialectical approach to symbolism, here:
Next in my political treatise, I briefly discuss Jane Jacobs’s Trader and Guardian Syndromes and relate them to the polarity of commerce and politics. That gives me cause to cite my Vervaeke critique in which I make an important point.
Vervaeke correctly sees the corruptive influence of “the pornographers and the military” on human endeavors including technological innovation. They correspond to epithymia and thymos, respectively. But the lower passions have logos (reason) to rule over them — and logos too is passible. It has ignorance as a vice. Knowledge of God and godliness is its virtue, but the lack thereof is its vice. And a logos asleep at the reins is what causes the chariot of the soul to crash in the first place.
Anyways, in my political treatise, I go on to refer to how mass media makes use of thymos and epithymia to manipulate its audience, something I discuss in my article “Art as food.” Here I again mention the role of logos in correcting the passions, but also how its work is not complete without the conversion of the passions, hence the potentially positive role that art can play in our lives.
That article made reference to the previous week’s article “Ideas as fiction,” which I conclude with the following chart:
Whereas I don’t say much about the chart in “Ideas as Fiction,” I would later go on to talk about it more in a Symbolic World article, “What Counts as Symbolic Thinking?” Because this piece is offsite, Substack doesn’t provide a fancy way to link to it. But here’s the lead picture and a custom button you can press. (Beware, the article will open in the present tab if you don’t right-click.)
The chart lays out how the pattern of thymos and epithymia — the repulsive and attractive faculties of the soul — appears also in how the rational mind works, particularly in dialectical thinking. The analogy is an important one to make in seeing how the patterns of tripartite psychology affect not just our practical lives, but our contemplative lives as well. I cover the relationship between the components of dialectic in the following paper, and in the introduction I discuss its relationship to thymos and epithymia:
In that introduction I further claim how our two modern physical models of the universe, quantum mechanics and general relativity, also follow the pattern of thymos and epithymia, as our impassioned lives appear to have determinative influence over our loftiest cosmological speculation. That’s a point I make also in my political treatise, before talking about dialectical reason, and eventually the left-brain/right-brain neuroscientific philosophy of Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist associates the right hemisphere of the brain with nous and the left hemisphere with logos, but I see in his observations a clear pattern of epithymia and thymos, as they manifest in encephalic activity. I have yet to write expansively on this topic, but I broach it here:
How can thymos and epithymia be characterized as operating in contemplative ways? I commonly use the terms conviction and conjecture to describe the phenomenon, which is the last thing I mention in the second chapter of the political treatise when I rifle through examples of the pattern. This is another area where I have yet to write anything extensive, but it is foundational to what I had to say in my article on conspiracy theory.
I was in the midst of creating a bunch of thymos–epithymia material for Substack a couple years ago during Cheese Week when I wanted to take a break and do something creative and less labor-intensive. So I shared three short pieces of creative writing that I had recently found among some old boxes from high school — one piece for each faculty of the soul. It gave me cause to utilize Jesus’s expression in the Gospels, “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” as a concise expression of the torment brought about by the lower passions.
I’ll often use biblical imagery like weeping and gnashing of teeth, or sword and famine (from Jeremiah), or King of the North and King of the South (from Daniel), to explain the dynamic of the lower passions. The Prophet Daniel’s reference to kings of north and south has as its most immediate historical meaning Seleucid Syria centered in Antioch (the north) and Ptolemaic Egypt centered in Alexandria (the south). That dynamic of thymic Antioch and epithymetic Alexandria carries over into the Christian era and influences how I map the pentarchy of patriarchates codified in law by Emperor St. Justinian the Great:
I made this image and commented on it in the course of discussing the Fifth Ecumenical Council here:
But as I was saying concerning the Bible, the phenomenon that Greeks describe technically, with left-brain specificity, using terms like thymos and epithymia, the authors of the Bible tend to describe analogically, with right-brain poetry, using a great variety of images. It often comes up when I’m commenting on Scripture that, in order to explain the pattern of thought behind the text, I have to discuss the dynamic of thymos and epithymia. Examples of this include when I commented on the ninefold fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–23 (with further elaboration in the comments), and when I explained my outline of the Ten Commandments in the fifth section of my big Symbolic World article “The Cosmic Chiasmus.”
Speaking of my work on Symbolic World, I also used the traditional teaching on the tripartite soul to explain the beautiful pattern of semi-domes in the Hagia Sophia Cathedral in Istanbul.
I’ve already noted how the polarization of longing and lording structures Western politics and also conforms to the pattern of dialectical thought. History, you would therefore expect — at least modern Western history — would also have something to do with thymos and epithymia in how it is structured. Indeed, my big political treatise spun out into a massive three-part sequel tracing the sequence of party systems in the history of the United States. The polarization of parties, patterned after thymos and epithymia — but driven by ouroboric reason — determines the shape of the sequences, so examples of how the lower passions manifest in our lives abound throughout the articles. Here, for instance, in part 2, is where I get to mention how L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz characters the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion conform to the pattern of the tripartite soul — and how, in the misapplication of these faculties to the head and the heart, Baum accidentally reveals how modern, materialist psychology has strayed from basic ancient understanding.
So that leaves me with just my Letterboxd reviews left to link to. This is where I made my first attempt at applying my knowledge of the lower passions, when reviewing D.W. Griffith’s True Heart Susie (1919). The title character of this movie is epithymia personified; she requires her sweetheart to do all the thymic lifting for her. For the review I created a gif that illustrates this relationship well, but it’s too big for Substack; you can view it on Imgur. How this movie’s story resolves its conceit I find especially moving.
There’s a different movie that does the reverse of True Heart Susie’s idea, presenting a male protagonist who is all thymos, no epithymia. That film would be The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979), a Japanese movie about a science teacher who builds an atomic bomb to gain power over the powers that be, only to discover once he’s gained dominance over the state authorities that he doesn’t know what to demand of them... because he has no desires. Unfortunately I have nothing to link to about this movie at the moment, but I did record a podcast about it once that hopefully will be available one day. (It and seven other conversations have been stuck for years in post-production hell, but there is progress being made.)
Last of all, there’s my review of a French movie set in the northeastern corner of Africa traveling from Djibouti to Alexandria, known in English as Empty Quarter: A Woman in Africa (1985). I put a lot of ideas dear to me in the review. How does the image of two Tyrannosaurus rexes paralyzed from the waist down, fighting each other with their puny little arms strike you? That’s what this movie is like, except it’s sad instead of funny. And by sad I don’t mean weepy, but sterile and depressing — it’s brilliant! A nomadic Parisian man with paralyzed thymos becomes captive to an anemic desire for a young nomadic Parisian woman with paralyzed epithymia, simmering with tepid vexation. The combination of the two gendered pathologies is fascinating, while it lasts. And it’s relevant — unfortunately, the movie has a lot to say about the infertile malaise the world is in today.
If somehow you’ve reached all the way down to the bottom of the list, I must thank you for all your attention. Feel free to reach out to me with comments, questions, or discussion; I don’t imagine there will be many of you, so I can handle it!
As my writing develops, I’ll decide what to do with this page going forward. Either I’ll keep it as is, like the closing chapter of a period of my writing, or I’ll update it so that it can function as a perennial landing page for this topic. We’ll see where life leads! Glory be to God for all things.
I really liked your connection of the rhizome with St. Maximus. It seems to me that systematic writing is kingly, whereas rhizomatic writing is prophetic. Would you agree?