Passion, Sin, and the Dissolution of the Flesh. Paper: Erminia Passannanti. The Academy, St Clare’s (13/11/2000)
Senior Seminar – Paper: Erminia Passannanti
The Academy, St Clare’s (13/11/2000)
Passion, Sin, and the Dissolution of the Flesh
The title of my paper is “Passion, sin and the dissolution of the flesh.” By “dissolution of the flesh,” I intend the physical decay following either an illness or a state of moral atrophy. An equally apt title would have been The Pleasures and Terrors of Imagination. I discuss these themes based on a critical appreciation of the Gothic story The Monk by Lewis and the modernist novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce.
I am not, of course, attempting to lecture on “the pleasures and tortures of imagination,” as I am sure you all have your own expertise in this field. I would merely like to offer some reflections on the theme of love and death central to these Senior Seminars.
Before approaching the plot of The Monk, it is necessary to consider the etymology of the word “passion,” which originates from the agony of Christ on the cross, referred to in Christianity as the “Good Friday Passion.” Originating from the Latin cum passionem, the term “compassion” refers directly to “suffering together,” the sharing of pain, the “feeling together with another of the same kind,” and therefore to being compassionate, pitiful. The association of “passion” with the cathartic power of tragedy is clear in Aristotle’s Poetics, where compassion is seen as an imaginative response that solicits both fear and pity, sympathy and identification. Already, the word “passion” establishes a connection between pity and suffering.
The connection to Christ’s martyrdom adds an important reference to the dissolution of the flesh through passion. Moreover, the Gospel emphasizes that Christ died to cleanse the world from the sin of mankind, affirming the endemic presence of sin in human culture. The dichotomy love/death, the dying for love, has been made sublime in Christian iconography, publicly displaying Christ’s agony in churches and cathedrals.
On a symbolic level, we are made voyeurs of Christ sacrificing his life for mankind. Seated in a church, we can silently witness the macabre details of his suffering, sharing Jesus’s passion. In Christian terms, Christ’s death represents salvation and regeneration, whereas in pagan imagery such as the danse macabre, death is secularized as the ultimate, fruitless end of human endeavors. The Christian connotation of dying for love—the passion—was inherited from Greek tragedy and, later, in the pre-Romantic and Romantic age, transmitted from religiosity to the profane field of sensual love and made “sublime.”
The Sublime
Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Inquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), distinguished beauty and sublimity: beauty is determined by brightness, smallness, etc., while sublimity is enhanced by solitude, emptiness, darkness, and terror. Sublime emotions arise from the intensity of conflicting feelings such as fear and desire, producing catharsis. This effect is observed in classical tragedy, Gothic novels, and horror films, where the imagination allows us to safely experience fear and attraction.
David Hume, while distrustful of imagination’s effects on reasoning, appreciated its role in strengthening imaginative activity through associations of ideas. His evaluation anticipates the Romantic stress on imagination, which, in Coleridge’s words, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates the world in order to re-create it.” Plotinus attributed a similar cathartic power to imagination, reconciling conflicting opposites creatively.
Love, Death, Sin, and Virtue
These themes appeal to both intellect and sensibility, evident in the success of sixteenth-century Spanish tragedy and Shakespearian plays such as Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, which explore revenge, lust, jealousy, and passion. Crimes of passion, in some legal systems, are regarded as mitigated compared to premeditated murder. When crimes of passion enter literature, they often attract large audiences due to their morbid appeal.
The Gothic Novel: The Monk
The Monk belongs to the Gothic literary tradition, fashionable in the late eighteenth century and rooted in the idea of the sublime. Critics of the time saw Gothic fiction as an expression of the irrational human psyche repressed by English rationalism. When published in 1796, The Monk shocked contemporary readers: British Critic noted, “Lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature are here brought together without apology.” Coleridge described the novel as “blasphemous,” marking it as controversial.
The Gothic evokes images of the danse macabre, castles, graveyards, ghosts, and vampires. Lewis’s novel juxtaposes profane and sacred, erotic and moralizing elements. Ambrosio, the monk, and Antonia, the pious woman, are caught in an incestuous, unreciprocated passion, reflecting the separation of siblings through early family dismemberment. Ambrosio’s corruption is catalyzed by Matilda, who seduces him while disguised as a priest. His descent illustrates the incompatibility of passion and sex with religious and social obligations.
The novel presents a moral paradox: restraint of desire, though socially necessary, breeds perversion; yet freedom—sexual, moral, or political—risks damnation. Lewis’s portrayal of Ambrosio echoes Sade, while Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray similarly links sexual liberation to spiritual degradation. Dante’s Inferno also depicts uncontrolled lust as a path to eternal dissolution.
Reception and Morality
The Monk’s popularity stemmed from scandal and public fascination with perversion.¹ Critics were horrified by cheap reprints and anonymous female Gothic writers. Lewis’s work combined a sensational story with readers’ appetites for taboo themes. Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1714) argues that excess imagination interacts with the body, while Hume sees virtue as a felt moral sense. Both suggest morality emerges from internal faculties, vulnerable to overwhelming emotion.
In religion, this internal regulator promotes salvation through abstinence. Characters like Ambrosio, Dorian Gray, and Stephen Dedalus illustrate how passion conflicts with societal and spiritual codes. Sin becomes bitter, remorseful, and instructive; pleasure is always mediated by moral context. Literature enables readers to safely experience transgression, indulging in voyeuristic pleasure without real danger.
Conclusion
Ambrosio, Dorian Gray, and Stephen Dedalus embody the contradictions of their societies. Their passions, sins, and eventual fates reveal the interplay of imagination, morality, and cultural codes. Literature allows us to confront the dissolution of the flesh and the pleasures of sin at a safe distance, highlighting both human desire and ethical constraint.
¹ The Monk was published anonymously in 1796. The second edition appeared by September 1796, after Lewis’s election to Parliament in July. This anonymity protected the author and increased curiosity. Numerous cheap reprints, translations, and adaptations followed. Byron noted Lewis wrote The Monk at twenty, apparently exhausted by its creation. Walter Scott commented that Lewis “remained insensible of the passion of ballads, which became clichéd, similar to Gothic novels.” In the nineteenth century, Shelley and the Brontës show the tradition’s influence. Today, Stephen King exemplifies Gothic continuation. The Gothic fascination with decadence stems from medieval aversion to nature, spiritual fanaticism, and the desire to control pleasures. The term “Gothick” initially denoted bizarre or tasteless art but later described impressions evoking Burke’s sublime, produced by conflicting forces of love, passion, body, and soul.
