Following my penchant for tracing the history of our key terms, I’ve gone back to examine the pair ‘active’ - ‘passive’ and some other pairs of related terms. Their Latin roots mean (with a little help from http://wordinfo.info), respectively:
ag- agen- act- agi- agit- : to set in motion, to shake; to drive; to do, to act, to lead, to conduct, to guide pass- pati- suffering, feeling; enduring
The one who is active is an ‘agent’ , while the one who is acted upon is a ‘patient’. This is a quite useful distinction in grammar. At the syntactic level the subject of a verb might not be the one who is actually (semantically) doing something, as in “The man’s left hand was licked by the dog.” But at the semantic level the agent in the sentence is the dog and the man's hand is the patient.
We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly. But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”
We sometimes lose sight of this root sense of patient as the opposite of agent if we are thinking of the related meaning of waiting calmly. But if we think of the medical use of the term, it aligns pretty well with the dictionary sense as “one who suffers or undergoes”, especially if we remember at the same time the broader historical sense of ‘suffer’ that we still can see in “She does not suffer fools gladly.”
And once we recover the sense of ‘patient’ it becomes easier to see the traditional opposition of ‘action’ to ‘passion’ . For many modern readers it can seem odd to say that to be passionate is not active. But over the long history of language, going back to Greek and Latin, the idea has been that a passionate individual was being subjected to emotional or other compelling forces. Indeed, when we feel emotions we say we "are moved", an idea contained in the very word 'emotion'. We still retain this sense of being acted upon in the Christian phrase “the passion of Christ”. The reference is not to Christ’s strong motivation, but rather to what he suffered, or underwent as the patient in the story.
