Welcome to answers from an apostolic faith.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
Today we answer the question: What are the passions and how do I fight them? In order for us to understand what the passions are and how the Church defines them, let's turn to one of our great saints, Saint Basil the Great. Saint Basil, he begins to explain what the passions are by first demonstrating what virtue is. He says that virtue is when we take the faculties and the gifts that God has given us and created inside us when He created us in His image and use those same faculties and those gifts to be able to turn towards God, to know Him and to grow in His likeness. On the contrary of this, what the passions are is when we wilfully take those same faculties and instead of turning towards God, we turn towards something that is temporal and something that is created. Instead of using those gifts and those faculties to turn towards the Creator, what we end up doing is that we use those faculties to turn towards our own pleasures and by in the process what happens is that passions begin to develop inside the human person.
We've just defined what passions are, but let's take a moment and try to understand where passions came from. So again, it's important to realize that passions were not part of the original image of God that was placed inside of humanity. You see, what is natural for the Christian is to realize that virtue is part of our natural creation. What is unnatural is to see passions develop inside the human being, which is interesting, because today, when you speak to the regular person off of the street, what they will tell you is that well humanity, it's broken, humanity... it's normal for humanity to have weaknesses and vices and so on and so forth. But the Church would not adopt that kind of language. It is not natural; it is not normal, for us to give in to the passions. And how it is that they came to be is clearly when we speak of the fall, when humanity distanced itself from God and walked away from His goodness. In the process, we left ourselves exposed to the evil that could occur inside us. St. Macarius the Great describes this wonderfully. Let us turn to St. Macarius and see how he explains this in his homilies. St. Macarius says the following:
''Through the first man [Adam], through the first man's disobedience, we have received in ourselves an element alien to our nature [so alien here, meaning that it is foreign to us]: the malice of the passions, which having passed into habit and inveterate disposition has become our nature.'' (St. Macarius the Great, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, Collection II: Homily IV, Part 8)
St. Macarius is explaining here that it is through the fall and the introduction of sin that suddenly our nature has been changed. What was once considered unnatural has now become something that we are used to.
What do the passions do to us? What we see is that when a man and any human being is overtaken by his passions, suddenly there is something that happens inside him that is unruly. There is almost an addiction. He begins to act in a way that is unnatural for him to act. What we see here is that there is struggle; something begins to happen where we almost see a state of illness inside the person. As a matter of fact, when we turn to the Fathers of the Church, typically when they speak of the passion, they speak of it as if it were turned to a person mad. They speak of it as if it were illness, madness, craziness, if you wish. Why? Because it begins to make the human being do things that naturally they themselves would not do. And we see this very clearly depicted in the words of St. Paul the Apostle who speaks it so beautifully and yet at the same time, what he speaks is truly tragedy. Let us turn to Romans, chapter 7 for just a moment to see how St. Paul describes what happens inside a human being when the passions take over. Romans, chapter 7 reads the following:
'' 15 For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. 16 If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. 17 But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. 18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. 19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. 20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.'' (Romans 7:15-20)
Here, my beloved, you see a very clear image, a very sad image of the tragedy that happens to the human being when passions take over. I don't want to give in to the passion that has developed in my life in the form of addiction, in the form of habit, and yet I do it, despite the fact that I hate that this has become a part of me.
Now what are these passions? Just to name a few, and although the list can be very exhaustive, typically the Orthodox Church names eight of them and those eight are the following: self-love, gluttony, lust, love of money (greed), sadness (ακηδία (aκidía) being sloth, if you wish, or dejection), anger, fear, vainglory 1 , and pride. All of these come together and form the list that typically the Church would call the passions that we fight.
How are we then expected to fight these passions that grow inside us and ultimately begin to tear us down? Well, the Church offers us many solutions and we see it beautifully in the tradition of the Church when we read the Church Fathers. They offer to us solutions and we
1 Vainglory is synonymous with self-love. Both terms usually refer to the same passion.
even see that in the lives of the saints, who are the children of the Church, that there is hope for us to be able to conquer these passions, just as the Lord has promised us that we should be of good cheer for He has conquered the world.
Just to give you an idea of how the Church establishes this idea inside us, in the morning prayer of every Agpeya of the Coptic Church, in the litanies right after the reading of the Gospel, the second litany, the prayer here, what it says is that for every believer to raise his heart to God and to ask for God to be able to inspire him to conquer over these passions. Listen to what the litany says:
''Oh Christ our Lord, the true light, as daylight shines upon us, let the bright senses and the luminous thoughts shine within us and do not let the darkness of sinful passions overtake us.'' (Prime Prayer, Litany 2)
What we see here is a very clear request for us to be able to conquer these passions and we pray for it every single morning. Furthermore, the Church gives us hope by teaching us that the Fathers of the Church, those who were heroes and the pillars of our faith, have also left us traces of how it is that we can conquer. We see this very clearly in the writings of St. John Cassian. He says the following, when speaking of the Fathers of the Church:
''Like skilful doctors who not only treat existing diseases, but also know how to prevent future ones and to take precautions with wise advice and medicine, in the same way these true doctors of the soul treat the emerging diseases of the heart in advance with their spiritual teaching like a heavenly antidote, and do not allow them to grow in the minds of the young ones, instructing them both in the causes of their present temptations and the means to cure them.'' (St. John Cassian, Institutes 6.17.2)
Here, St. John, what he is doing is explaining to us that these passions, that we have hope to be able to overcome them through the teachings of the Church and the Church Fathers. In future videos, we will explore all eight of those passions, one by one. We will talk about them and how they manifest themselves in the lives of the believers and we will hopefully shed light as to how the Church recommends that we overcome these passions.
For now, remember: Know your faith, live your faith, and teach your faith. And to God be the glory now and forever unto the ages of all ages. Amen.