As words have become part of my inner passion recently, I was wondering, what is the etymology and primal meaning of the word “passion”? Not just passion when we talk about our highly acknowledged interests, but when it’s used mainly in relation to Christ. I wondered: “What is a ‘passion of Christ’?” Is it the passion that we commonly use when we talk about love, sexual drive or favorite things to do or is it something completely different?
Passion had completely different notion than what we use currently. It comes from Latin and means “suffering, enduring”. So it has meant “that which must be endured.” Similarly in Greek “pathos” means “suffering”, as well as “emotion” or “feeling”.
Since 16th century, passion acquired a new secular meaning, which turned from suffering to any feeling or emotion that makes a person be out of control and become “its passive instrument”. So here we are coming upon another word which comes from passion: passive (capable of suffering). In that way, when someone says that they are saddened or excited with joy, it is a passion, as long as one is under its influence.
Nowadays our favorite activities are passions. Playing guitar, reading poetry, traveling have become the obsessive parts of our lives that we enjoy against the daily responsibilities and duties that fall on us like suffering. In that sense our lives have become dual passions, on one side being friends with our inner drives and emotions and on the other side enduring the suffering which we wouldn’t choose.
“Writing was strange. I needed to write. It was a disease, a drug, a heavy compulsion, yet I didn’t like to think of myself as a writer.” — Charles Bukowski
Interestingly and perhaps some of the readers will relate to that feeling when in the process of that “passionate” activity, we are obsessed and enchanted in a way that one would actually wish to reach the end, the orgasmic final point, so one can put it away and rest. However, that’s rarely the case. Once the painting has been finished or a song recorded and mastered, we will have to face another new beginning, another creative idea that will run again and again endlessly. One might ask: “will that ever end?” Inside, instinctively we might hear that there won’t be any end. It seems, all we can do is to bear it and accept this resuscitating inner energy that keeps one awake or mad among normal others.