My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE. Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ.
PURIFICATION: THE PASSIONS
By Father Dumitru Staniloae
The Essence of the Passions
The passions represent the lowest level to which human nature can fall. Both their Greek name, pathi, as well as the Latin, passiones, show that man is brought by them to a state of passivity, of slavery. In fact, they overcome the will, so that the man of the passions is no longer a man of will; we say that he is a man ruled, enslaved, carried along by the passions.
Another characteristic of the passions is that in them an unquenchable thirst is manifested, which seeks to be quenched and can't be. Blondel says that they represent man's thirst for the infinite, turned in a direction in which they can't find their satisfaction. Dostoevsky has a similar idea. ["All evil," says S.L. Frank, "which in Dostoevsky always has a spiritual origin: arrogance, vainglory, vindictiveness, cruelty, hatred, pleasure itself, for him comes from the aspiration of the soul to fight against suffocated and humbled holiness, or of imposing and of affirming its rights, even in an insane and perverse way."]
Saint Neilos the Ascetic writes that the stomach, by gluttony, becomes a sea impossible to fill--a good description of any passion. [The nature which has become the slave of passion "...sends to the stomach through the deep canal dug by gluttony food prepared for it, as into a sea which can't be filled."] Saint Neilos applies the words of Solomon to the stomach: "Into the sea all the rivers go, and ye the sea is never filled" (Ecclesiastes 1:7), "for the stomach and the sea are alike: They absorb the rivers that pour into them without being filled; the one consumes by digestion, the other by saltiness, the things that empty into them, they are never full and never shut their mouths." Peristeria 4, PG 79.821. "Evil is the irrational movement of the spiritual faculties toward something else than toward their final goal, because of a mistaken judgment. Now the final goal I call the Cause of things, toward which all things move in a natural way, even if evil, covering its envy under the image of goodness, by cunning persuades man to turn his longing toward something else than the Cause of all things, creating in him the ignorance of the Cause" (St. Maximus. Questions to Thalassios, The Introduction, PG 90.253]. This always unsatisfied infinity is due both to the passion itself, as well as to the object with which it seeks satisfaction. The objects which the passions look for can't satisfy them because objects are finite and as such don't correspond to the unlimited thirst of the passions...
"...Now the infinite thirst of the passions in themselves is explained in this way: The human being has a spiritual basis and therefore a tendency toward the infinite which also is manifested in the passions; but in these passions the tendency is turned from the authentic infinite which is of a spiritual order, toward the world, which gives an illusion of the infinite. Man, without being himself infinite, not only is fit, but is also thirsty for the infinite and precisely, for this reason, is also capable of, and longs for, God, the true and only infinite (homo capax divini--man capable of the divine). He has a capacity and is thirsty for the infinite not in the sense that he is in a state to win it, to absorb it in his nature--because then human nature itself would become infinite--but in the sense that he can and must be nourished spiritually from the infinite, and infinitely. He seeks and is able to live in a continual communication with it, in a sharing with it. But man didn't want to be satisfied with this sharing in the infinite; he wanted to become himself the center of the infinite, or he believed that he is such a center, he let himself be tricked by his nature's thirst for the infinite…
Passion is something irrational. Everything in the world is rational according to Saint Maximus the Confessor, with its basis in Divine Logoi; only passion is irrational. Note its supreme irrationality. The passionate man realizes more and more that finite things can't satisfy his aspiration for the infinite, and this bores and discourages him....
"...In early Christian literature, the passions are considered to be eight (8) in number, when vainglory is joined with pride, seven. They are gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness, self-esteem and pride (Saint John Cassian, On the Eight Vices, Phi, pp. 73-93). Basically, they coincide with the Severn Capital Sins: gluttony, debauchery, avarice, envy sloth, and pride, if we identify envy and listlessness. (Source: Orthodox Spirituality. A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar).
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!"--Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George