Of late, there is an epidemic of excitement. Commerce crackles with it. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is, respectively, so excited to be the new realtor in the neighborhood, the new car dealer in town, or the new sales chief for Gizmo, Inc. But wait! Every Tess, Kate, and Sally makes the same claim. Questions arise. Can all these worthies really be that excited? Upon reviewing their bona fides, it also turns out that each is passionate about selling houses, cars, or “gizmos.” Plus, in pitching their skills with TV and radio adverts, each of them resorts to impassioned (and scripted) speeches.

As a philosopher, I puzzle about how words are used. After all, words mean something, don’t they? To be sure, words come to have new meanings over time. They become polyvalent. The concepts they signify can evolve. But sometimes words are abused, and sometimes both words and concepts undergo a devolution.

Let’s consider passion. It stems from the Latin pati, to suffer. Passio appears as a word in Christian theology, and we find it in Tertullian (c. 150–240). In English, the Biblical translators John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1354) and William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) shift to passion.

There is, moreover, a broad philosophical sense: Aristotle’s categories include, under quality, the corelative terms action and passion. On his view, we might inquire of anything we experience whether it is acting upon something or being acted upon. There is, indeed, a unity that comes into play: thus, the building of a house is one with a house’s being built.

Classical thinkers, especially the Stoics, also consider the “passions of the soul,” what we might term the emotions. Even today we call a person who takes bad news without flinching “stoical.” St. Thomas Aquinas, for his part, takes a balanced view of the passions in ST I-II q. 24, art. 3. He writes, “As the Stoics held that every passion of the soul is evil, they consequently held that every passion of the soul lessens the goodness of an act; since the admixture of evil either destroys good altogether, or makes it to be less good.” But he characteristically adds that we need to make a distinction: “This is true indeed, if by passions we understand none but the inordinate movements of the sensitive appetite, considered as disturbances or ailments. But if we give the name of passions to all the movements of the sensitive appetite, then it belongs to the perfection of man’s good that his passions be moderated by reason.”

Even so, Thomas might well excuse from criticism the Stoic Seneca (c. 4 BC–65), Nero’s onetime tutor. In a revealing admission to a friend (Letter 53 to Lucilius), Seneca recounts abandoning ship in a storm: “Remembering my training as a long-standing devotee of cold baths, I dived into the sea in just the way a cold-water addict ought to—in my wooly clothes. You can imagine what I suffered as I crawled out over the rocks, as I searched for a route to safety.” And what does Seneca make of this and like misadventures? They suffice to “extract an admission that something is wrong from even a tough and hardened individual.” “Philosophy,” he reminds himself, is “not something one takes up in odd moments,” and he urges his friend to “Give your whole mind to her.” Thereby reason can moderate one’s passions!

Yet isn’t there something far greater than moderation? Yes, and philosophy could not imagine, much less anticipate it. We are now a wholly new people; we are Easter people. But there would be no Easter had there not been the Passion of Christ. That Passion brings an extraordinary triumph, the triumph of life over death. With the exaltation of the Cross comes the light of Christ, the Easter Vigil’s exsultet with which we rejoice.

St. Paul of the Cross, in 1720, founded a religious order, the Congregation of the Passion of Jesus Christ. The Passionists, as they are called, give special emphasis in the parish missions that they preach to the extraordinary dynamic of the Passion. Out of devotion they often sew an emblem of the Sacred Heart, surmounted by a cross, into the cloth of their habits.

How stark is the contrast between these Passionists and the passionate banality of what often amounts to a kind of lifestyle branding of whatever we fancy. Now to be “passionate” is simply to be enthusiastic — as enthusiastic as necessary to market one’s favored product.

Ah well, gentle reader, I have a confession to make. I’ve dreamt, more than once, of the convening of a Committee of Word Whistleblowers. Its members will be tasked with alerting the citizenry to egregious devolutions of language and the resulting distortion of the concepts to which they direct us. The deliberations of the Committee and the punitive measures it recommends will be published far and wide. While what I have in mind is still only a dream, I am — to speak boldly — excited to share it with you.