“Yes,” I said. “He’s a real
aficionado.”
“He’s not an aficionado like you are.”
Aficion means passion. An
aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights.
That is from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which I am finally
reading. I didn’t intend to ignore
Hemingway this long; it just happened.
Nobody made me read him in school.
Finally when I was casting about at a bookstore I stumbled onto this and
decided it was time.
Hemingway’s passage about “aficionado”
struck me. I cannot grant him much
authority on Spanish vocabulary, but I do recognize the point he makes about
passion. When he wrote the book in 1926,
I am not sure how many people would have used the word “passion” in quite the
way he does, in this case about bull-fighting. Hemingway wouldn’t have needed to make the
point so elaborately if he were writing for a modern audience.
Now, everybody talks this way about
passion. Find your passion; Follow your passion; I’m just not passionate about
that. These are all statements
uttered a thousand times a day at any given Starbucks, and usually taken in all
seriousness. Christians have always
regarded the passions not as
imperatives, however – quite the
contrary. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
1763 The term "passions" belongs to the Christian patrimony.
Feelings or passions are emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite that
incline us to act or not to act in regard to something felt or imagined to be
good or evil.
1767 In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally
qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will.
Passions are said to be voluntary, "either because they are commanded by
the will or because the will does not place obstacles in their way." It
belongs to the perfection of the moral or human good that the passions be
governed by reason.
1768 Strong feelings are not decisive for the morality or the holiness of
persons; they are simply the inexhaustible reservoir of images and affections
in which the moral life is expressed. Passions are morally good when they
contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case. The upright will orders
the movements of the senses it appropriates to the good and to beatitude; an
evil will succumbs to disordered passions and exacerbates them. Emotions and feelings can be taken up into the
virtues or perverted by the vices.
If you study the word Hemingway
starts with – aficion – you can discern
a relationship to fixation, which
reveals something the true nature of the phenomenon described. Aficionado
could be rendered one who is fixated. This reveals the aspect of passion that is voluntary (1767, above). Because of passions’
dependence on emotions and feelings, they
can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices. (1768, above)
Armed with this ancient and divinely
assisted understanding, we should all be careful to evaluate our passions, cultivating
the good ones and resisting the evil ones.
Who, after all, would stand before a graduating class and exhort the
members to Follow your fixation! Yet so it happens too often.
I have not progressed far enough in
the book to know whether Hemingway’s hero’s aficion,
or passion, turns out to be for good or for evil. That’s what makes the book interesting. Analyzing and shaping our own passions, our
own fixations, and ordering them toward what is good, resisting what is evil in
them, is not only what makes our lives interesting: it is what makes us human.
Monsignor Smith
