The Eight Principal Passions, With Their Subdivisions and Offshoots
Drawn from the writings of the holy Fathers.
1. Gluttony
Overeating, drunkenness, non-observance and breaking of fasts, eating in secret, greediness, and intemperance in general. Improper and excessive love of the flesh, of its life and ease—from which is formed self-love, which gives rise to faithlessness toward God, the Church, virtue, and one’s fellow men.
2. Fornication
Lustful burning, lustful sensations and desires of the body, lustful sensations and desires of the soul and heart (titillation), the acceptance of impure thoughts, conversing with them, taking pleasure in them, consenting to them, lingering over them. Lustful fantasies and captivity of mind. Defilement by involuntary emission. Failure to guard the senses—especially the sense of touch—in which boldness destroys all virtues. Foul language and the reading of lascivious books. Natural sins of fornication: fornication and adultery. Unnatural sins of fornication: self-abuse, sodomy, bestiality, and the like.
3. Avarice
Love of money, and in general love of movable and immovable property. The desire to grow rich. Deliberation on ways to enrich oneself. Fantasies of wealth. Fear of old age, sudden poverty, sickness, or exile. Miserliness. Covetousness. Unbelief toward God, lack of hope in His providence. Attachments, or the morbid and excessive love of various corruptible objects, which deprives the soul of its freedom. Being carried away by vain cares. Love of gifts. Appropriating what belongs to others. Usury. Harshness of heart toward the poor in need and toward all who are in want. Theft. Robbery.
4. Anger
Hot-temperedness, the acceptance of wrathful thoughts, fantasies of anger and revenge, the agitation of the heart by fury, the darkening of the mind by it: unseemly shouting, argument, abusive, harsh, and cutting words, striking, pushing, killing. Remembrance of wrongs, hatred, enmity, vengeance, slander, condemnation, the troubling and offending of one’s neighbor.
5. Despondency
Grief, anguish, the cutting off of hope in God, doubt concerning God’s promises, ingratitude to God for all that befalls one, faint-heartedness, impatience, failure to blame oneself, sorrow against one’s neighbor, murmuring, refusal of one’s cross, attempts to descend from it.
6. Sloth
Laziness toward every good deed, and especially toward prayer. Abandonment of the church and cell rule. Abandonment of unceasing prayer and of edifying reading. Inattentiveness and haste in prayer. Negligence. Lack of reverence. Idleness. Excessive comfort in sleep, lying down, and every manner of ease. Moving from place to place. Frequent departures from the cell, walks, and visits to friends. Idle talk. Jokes. Ribaldry. Abandonment of prostrations and other bodily ascetic labors. Forgetfulness of one’s sins. Forgetfulness of Christ’s commandments. Carelessness. Captivity of mind. Loss of the fear of God. Hardness of heart. Insensibility. Despair.
7. Vainglory
Seeking the glory of men. Boasting. Desire and seeking of earthly honors. Love of fine garments, carriages, servants, and furnishings. Attention to the beauty of one’s face, the pleasantness of one’s voice, and other qualities of the body. Disposition toward the sciences and perishable arts of this age, seeking to succeed in them for the sake of temporal earthly glory. Shame at confessing one’s sins. Concealing them from others and from one’s spiritual father. Cunning. Self-justification. Contradiction. Forming one’s own opinion. Hypocrisy. Lying. Flattery. People-pleasing. Envy. Contempt of one’s neighbor. Inconstancy of character. Pretense. Unconscionableness. A demonic character and way of life.
8. Pride
Contempt of one’s neighbor. Setting oneself above all. Audacity. Darkening and coarsening of the mind and heart. Their being fastened to earthly things. Blasphemy. Unbelief. Spiritual delusion. Falsely named knowledge. Disobedience to the Law of God and to the Church. Following one’s own carnal will. Reading heretical, profligate, and vain books. Insubordination to authorities. Sharp mockery. Abandonment of Christ-imitating humility and silence. Loss of simplicity. Loss of love toward God and one’s neighbor. False philosophy. Heresy. Atheism. Ignorance. Death of the soul.
Such are the maladies, such are the wounds, that together constitute the great wound—the oldness of the old Adam—which was formed from his fall. Of this great wound the holy prophet Isaiah speaks: “From the sole of the foot even to the head there is no soundness in it: neither bruise nor wound nor raw sore—there is no balm to apply, nor oil, nor bandage” (Is. 1:6). This means, according to the explanation of the Fathers, that the wound95—sin—is not partial, not on one single member, but on the entire being:[1] it has seized the body, seized the soul, taken possession of all the qualities and all the powers of man. This great wound God called death when, forbidding Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, He said: “in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Immediately upon eating the forbidden fruit, the first ancestors felt the eternal death: a carnal sensation appeared in their eyes; they saw that they were naked. In the knowledge of the body’s nakedness was reflected the nakedness of the soul, which had lost the beauty of innocence on which the Holy Spirit had rested. A carnal sensation acts in the eyes, and in the soul shame—in which is joined together the totality of all sinful sensations: pride, uncleanness, despondency, sloth, and despair! The great wound is the death of the soul; the oldness that came after the loss of the divine likeness is beyond remedy! The great wound the Apostle calls “the law of sin, the body of death” (Rom. 7:23–24), because the deadened mind and heart have turned entirely toward the earth, serve slavishly the corruptible desires of the flesh, have grown darkened and heavy, and have themselves become flesh. This flesh is no longer capable of communion with God (Gen. 6:3)! This flesh is incapable of inheriting eternal, heavenly blessedness (1 Cor. 15:50)! The great wound has spread over all of humanity and has become the unhappy inheritance of every man.
Contemplating my great wound, gazing upon my own death, I am filled with bitter grief! I do not know what to do. Shall I follow the example of the old Adam, who, seeing his nakedness, hastened to hide himself from God? Shall I, like him, seek to justify myself, laying the blame upon the causes of sin? It is vain—to hide from the All-Seeing! It is vain—to justify oneself before Him “Who is always victorious ‘when He judges’ (Ps. 50:6).
Instead of fig leaves, I will clothe myself in the tears of repentance; instead of self-justification I will offer sincere confession. Clothed in repentance and tears, I will stand before my God. But where shall I find my God? In paradise? I have been driven out from there—and the Cherub standing at the entrance will not let me in! By the very heaviness of my flesh I am riveted to the earth, my prison!
Sinful descendant of Adam, take courage! A light has dawned in your prison: God has descended to the lower country of your exile in order to raise you up to your heavenly homeland, which you have lost. You wished to know good and evil: He leaves you this knowledge. You wished to become “like God,” and from this you became in soul like the devil and in body like cattle and beasts: God, uniting you to Himself, makes you a god by grace. He forgives your sins. That is not all! He draws out from your soul the root of evil, the very infection of sin, the poison poured into the soul by the devil, and grants you a remedy for the entire path of your earthly life—for healing from sin, however many times you may be infected by it in your weakness. This remedy is the confession of sins. Do you wish to put off the old Adam—you who have already been clothed in the New Adam through holy baptism, but through your own iniquities have managed to revive within yourself the oldness and death, and to stifle the life, making it half-dead? Do you, who have enslaved yourself to sin and are drawn toward it by the violence of habit, wish to regain your freedom and righteousness? Then plunge yourself into humility! Overcome the vainglorious shame that teaches you to feign righteousness hypocritically and cunningly, and thereby to preserve and strengthen within yourself the death of the soul. Cast out sin; enter into enmity with sin through sincere confession of sin. This healing must precede all others; without it the healing by prayer, tears, fasting, and all other means will be insufficient, unsatisfying, and impermanent. Go, proud one, to your spiritual father—at his feet find the mercy of the Heavenly Father! Sincere and frequent confession alone, nothing else, can free one from sinful habits, make repentance fruitful, and correction firm and true.
In a brief moment of compunction—in which the eyes of the mind are opened to self-knowledge, which comes so rarely—I wrote this as a reproach to myself, as an exhortation, a reminder, and an instruction. And you, whoever with faith and love in Christ shall read these lines and perhaps find in them something of profit for yourself: offer a heartfelt sigh and prayer for a soul that has greatly suffered from the waves of sin, has often seen ruin and destruction before it, and has found repose in one harbor alone—in the confession of its transgressions.