ABSTRACT
The expression and management of sadness were controversial in the early Christian centuries. The dominant early Christian suspicion of or outright hostility towards the display of sadness is an interesting counterpoint to the prevalence of pious sorrow in later periods, such as middle Byzantine visual culture. How do we get from a Christianity in which sorrow is at best paradoxical and at worst a grievous sin, to a Christianity that embraces sadness as a valued mode of piety? An important turning point in Christian attitudes toward defining and managing sadness and depression is the emergence of Christian ascetic thought and practice in the early Byzantine period. A debate emerges in the influential psychology of the passions of Evagrios of Pontos (345–99) about the meaning and utility of the painful emotions of sadness and depression. Evagrios wrote extensively about lupe and about the related (and rather new) passion of akedia (translated variously as listlessness, dejection, depression or sloth). Evagrios’s construction of these emotions as two of his ‘eight evil thoughts’ would have a long influence in Byzantine ascetic thought as well as in the religious (and even secular) psychology of western Europe through modernity. The chapter explores important differences between the two passions delineated by Evagrios, his contemporaries, and those later influenced by this tradition. It focuses on exploring what is distinctive about early Byzantine approaches to lupe and akedia, and what light early Byzantine authors shed on the changing approaches toward sadness and depression in ascetic practice and care of the self in Byzantine ‘emotional communities’.
