On the polarization of epithymia and thymos, and just how devastating it can be

As illustrated by a scene from Li Shaohong’s Blush (1995)

I could write a book on epithymia and thymos. I keep writing about it in bits and pieces, but never systematically. My primary literary sources do the same thing, though, especially St. Maximus. St. Maximus, it is said, is a systematic thinker, but not a systematic writer. His writing rather displays ‘lateral’ thinking, which is to say he goes from side to side on a topic, looking at it from this angle here, then at a different angle somewhere else, etc. I think of it in terms of describing a crystal one facet at a time, never intending to touch on them all, as if that were even possible. Each time he uses terms to describe a facet of the crystal, you have to understand those terms in the context of that facet. When he uses those terms to describe another facet, they might mean slightly different things, but in the process of accumulating all these facet descriptions, the reader learns the patterns by which they exist — which is the key to understanding the crystal. In the end, it’s a markedly better way to learn about the crystal than a systematic treatise. For one thing, it ensures that the people seeking the knowledge of the crystal do so with the proper dedication, born of love. Merely curious persons can’t just sit down with a treatise one afternoon, read it to the point where they think they understand the crystal, and then toss it aside frivolously and move on to something else.

That’s an advantage, but a disadvantage is that whenever I return to the topic — do I have to reintroduce it every time? In the Patristic age, everyone already knew what epithymia and thymos were; that was just basic psychology. Likewise in our age, ego and id don’t have to be defined upon mentioning because we’re already immersed in Freudian psychology, as if it’s “scientific”. Ancient knowledge of the soul is so much better, though, “Enlightenment progress” be damned.

In this journal, I first treated the topic of epithymia and thymos, desire and anger, in “Are you filled with anger? Are you filled with lust?” and touched on it again in “A help meet, not a help against”. It came up as recently as last week when in “Art as food” I used it to describe succinctly how media manipulates our attention. The polarization of the two passions has an analogue in dialectic, as I mentioned in “The initiation of dialectic in ancient Greece” and suggested elliptically by way of the final chart in “Ideas as fiction”. (This here is the post that will have epithymia and thymos in the title, so I’m trying to be thorough in my indexing.) On The Symbolic World it played a role in how I interpreted the pattern of semi-domes in Hagia Sophia, and I also needed it to explain the shape of the Ten Commandments in “The Cosmic Chiasmus.”

Perhaps the most fruitful way to illustrate the topic of ancient tripartite psychology, however, is by using stories. As my literacy is in cinema much more than in prose fiction, that’s where I go for examples. I have put some of my best ideas on the topic in a review of Empty Quarter: A Woman in Africa (1985) on Letterboxd. Another pertinent review of mine is for True Heart Susie (1919). Today, here, I’m going to do something I’ve long wanted to do, discuss a scene from Li Shaohong’s Blush (1995).

Blush is a masterpiece. When it came out, it won some festival awards, including a top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Influential critic Jonathan Rosenbaum (the critic I’ve read more of than any other in my life) wrote a glowing review for the Chicago Reader that was anthologized in his book Essential Cinema. The film nonetheless remains little seen today. On Letterboxd it has a measly 97 viewers and somehow only eleven likes. I’ll have no qualms here discussing a big part of the narrative for readers I assume haven’t seen the movie — a movie that they are just now learning about and wouldn’t know how to see even if they wanted to. Nonetheless I’ll be leaving a huge chunk of the story out of my discussion, so there would be plenty in the film yet to discover, even after reading what I’m about to write.

I’m going to focus on a single eight-minute scene that comes late in the movie. I’ve excerpted the scene here (below) so that it can be watched. First, though, I’ve got to explain the context.

The woman you’ll see in the clip, Xiao’e, was raised in a high-end Shanghai brothel, accustomed all her life to comfort, satiety, and being taken care of by others. That all changed suddenly with the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, when the new government gathered up all the sex workers and sent them to labor re-education camps, which happens at the beginning of the movie. Xiao’e adjusts poorly to the new society. At one point in the early fifties (when the whole of the film takes place), she would rather hang herself than continue working in a factory, but is prevented from doing so by a guard. Salvation comes to her in the form of Lao Pu, a playboy from a rich family with whom she is acquainted through a friend at her previous place of business. With his family’s assets seized and his mother’s disapproval of his choice of female companions, Lao Pu also has a hard time adjusting to communism, but is more acquiescent to the reality of it. He has always been a lustful young man, but has also been notable for his kindness and understanding. Now in marriage to Xiao’e, he tempers his former desires, gets a job as an accountant, and does everything he possibly can to provide for his wife, which can never be much due to the dire economic reality.

And now they have a baby. In the previous scene in which we saw this couple, Xiao’e while pregnant and impoverished again tried to hang herself — a childish demonstration in the presence of Lao Pu, who she knew wouldn’t let her. He struggled to restrain her from harming herself then, but would never hit her. Early in their relationship, when Xiao’e was insulted by a female officer, she not knowing how to handle being treated harshly, looked to her man to settle the score for her, expecting him to go and rough up the offending woman. (That’s probably how things were handled for her at the brothel.) Lao Pu assured her, though, he has never hit anyone, let alone a woman. He is at heart a man free from anger.

Weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Epithymia and thymos, desire and anger, coexist along the same polar axis. They are but two sides of the same magnetic charge. Epithymia is the seat of attraction in the soul, pulling things into it through longing (the south pole). Thymos is the seat of repulsion in the soul, pushing objectionable things out of the way in a bid for control (the north pole). The two forces compel each other — there’s no such thing as a magnetic monopole, as if there could be a coin with tails and no heads. The pair of lower passions can’t exist apart.

When within a woman, as here, there is whipped up such a constant, enduring whirlpool of irrational, unfulfillable desire, the man who loves her will hardly be able to evade the force of polarization and will be driven to anger in response. Notice it’s Xiao’e who by the end of this confrontation is literally demanding that she be hit. She who is consumed by desire shouts very angrily. If she were alone, her desire and anger would collapse into one another and she would kill herself, as she has previously attempted. Because she exists in a unit of marriage, she looks to create the deadly polarity between herself and her husband, identifying herself with desire and therefore demanding he play the role of life-threatening anger. The explosion of magnetic charge fractally affects the couple downstairs, even, as they too begin shouting and bickering, with our couple above as well as among themselves — a fantastic dramatization of the idea I’m presenting here, if so emotionally brutal to watch. Notice too how multiple times the editing cuts on a 180° axis. Desire and anger are just two opposite perspectives of the same thing.

These polar dynamics do not need to come about precisely this way, it should be said. The woman’s desires could be quite temperate and reasonable, while the man’s angry bid for control could be irrational and tyrannical. Or the man could be undone by desires that compel his wife against her will to be a shrewish disciplinarian. Alternately, the wife’s willful shrewishness could provoke in the man wayward desires. All these scenarios also could just be external dramatizations of how a monastic falls in the wilderness all by himself. The soul of a human (male or female), or the soul of a marriage, could break down any number of ways.

But we are not left alone with our lower passions. Logos, reason, occupying the chief position in the tripartite soul, can short circuit a destructive explosion of magnetic force. Logos is supposed to guide the natural processes of epithymia and thymos, bending them towards reasonable ends that we call virtue. There exists for the epithymia a virtuous, chaste longing for what is beautiful, just, and true, and there exist for the thymos a courage and meekness that bring about and make real exactly those beautiful, just, and true things that epithymia longs for.

For Lao Pu, at the end of the scene, you could almost say his logos short circuits his anger. He hits himself instead of his wife. They’re one flesh, though, so that’s kind of the same. He remains a broken man. His logos itself, to describe his state technically, remains passible to ignorance — in this case, ignorance as to how to fix his marriage. Elliptically, the movie tells us what happens next: At his job as an accountant, to reattain the semblance of inner calm he feels is his natural state, he embezzles a good amount of money, enough for Xiao’e to live on in luxury for a week. He is predictably discovered soon enough, promptly arrested, imprisoned, and executed. To his impassioned mind it must have felt like a win-win. He both got to fulfill his role as provider for the woman he loves, and he never had to spend another day alive with her after that. He didn’t hang himself as Xiao’e has tried, not exactly; but through the process of polarization, he absorbed her suicidal passion all the same. Xiao’e then has to live with the fact that her intemperate desires have destroyed soul-and-body the one man who loved and cared for her. She takes it hard at first. Then within a year, we are told, she abandons her baby to another woman and runs off to the north with a new man, poor soul.

This image of desire as a force of destruction — it could hardly be more important for people of our age to consider. Western culture is hellbent on achieving a magnetic monopole of epithymia, as if that were possible. Everywhere and in everything, desire is justified as an absolute good, while thymic force is decried as evil, as if they weren’t one and the same magnetic field. In our strident attachment to desire, therefore, we are magnetically amassing unto ourselves large storehouses of wrath. Not to go too far astray, but the brilliant HBO Max show Search Party is about this, too. A small group of New York City twenty-somethings keep identifying with all their desires and for the life of them can’t figure out why they keep killing people. As the seasons progress, in the face of their guilt, they recommit to the debauchery of vanity that is their self-love, an apocalypse of bloodshed ensues, and they haven’t the least bit of ideology to understand why.

Look at the face of Xiao’e when her husband explodes in anger. Look at how shocked and appalled she is at his behavior when it was inarguably brought about by her own. I am by no means making an absolute statement on the nature of domestic violence here, as if to say that women in general are asking for it. You’d willfully have to deny what your soul is directly observing, however, to say that this particular woman wasn’t literally asking for it (“Hit me! Beat me till I’m dead!”). That her man refuses to do so makes this an interesting scene. Men that don’t refuse the temptation are not at all absolved of the crime. Russia is not absolved — for example. I wish to God they would rise above the magnetic field and thwart the West’s attempts to seduce them into a polarizing trap of desire and anger, in the process bringing honor to the religion they suppose to uphold… but they haven’t. Yes, the war in Ukraine is what I’ve been angling to discuss the whole time. I may not have come upon it gracefully, but here I am. By fighting the West on the battlefield of Ukraine, Russia becomes what they despise; in playing the role of anger in response to the West’s desire, they become the West themselves, fulfilling the West’s innermost self-destructive desires.

But as a Westerner myself, I can’t but concern myself chiefly with my own culture’s role in the war, so I write an article on a scenario like in Blush. I must do something constructive since my culture is the way it is because of my own contributions to it. As a Westerner, my own attachments to desire, my love of pleasure and comfort, the way I justify and excuse myself for my greedy behavior, have been the epithymetic whirlpool of suck that has brought about this war. Oh, and how shocked and appalled I am that Russia would defend its regional power where it matters to them most! (Again, as Christians they shouldn’t be refusing a ticket to Golgotha, but I can’t cast stones when I’m standing on the side of the Roman soldiers.) Today’s Russia is no Lao Pu, certainly. They haven’t his natural meekness to begin with, because they don’t come from a materially privileged background. If they were to rise to the occasion of this epic temptation, moreover, they would have done better to prepare for it doing something other than what they’ve been doing the last century: seven decades of atheism fueled by Western dialectic (playing their part in the Cold War the West got rich off of), followed by thirty years of corruption plus just enough religious dressing to play the role of antichrist tempting the elect within their midst. The rapacious, imperious West of which I am a member may be the leader of this rotten world, but I wish Russia weren’t being every bit the Westerner as I. Because coming to Orthodoxy from American humanism, I would tend to look to Russia for hope, hope for deliverance from this tempest of epithymia enveloping the world like some impoverished harlot’s pissy attitude. But with the reality of Russian history such as it is, it’s just not to be. There’s only one way out left.

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.