apatheia

… Evagrius of Pontus … defines apatheia as the very health of the soul….

This tradition reaches its most profoundly developed form in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, whose Chapters on Love is a virtual manual of instructions for the cultivation of apatheia, which is to say, for him, the cultivation of a spiritual vision that – having divested itself of all the fantasies summoned up by self-love, pride, the desire for power, and all other sins – can see all things with a pure heart, as images and reflections of the Logos who shaped them, and so love them without restraint, with a love so perfect that no perturbation or pathos can obviate its intensity. The mind’s life of illumination, he says, is born only of love, which is possible only for a mind purged of all hatred for others, because God is love itself and can be known and possessed only in love. Again, the attainment of this love is refinement of the soul’s innate dynamisms, so that concupiscence is transformed into divine desire and irascibility into divine love, and this grants us a true delight in divine beauty. And this state of mind is, for Maximus, properly called apatheia.

The Hidden and the Manifest, David Bentley Hart, page 56