Even the Smallest Stirrings of the Passions Must Be Driven Out. Righteous Anger

I want to praise you—or rather: I want to set forth the advantages of your situation with regard to the passions.

You have lived but a short time and have not yet become deeply enslaved to the passions. Though all the passions are present in you, they are still, so to speak, like small children—weak, and at most merely troublesome. This is a great advantage for you, because in many, many cases it will be enough for you simply to notice something passionate in order to turn away from it or drive it away. This is quite different from those who have lived long and have indulged the passions greatly. In them, the passions roar like lions and fling themselves with ferocity on anyone who rises up against them. Yet there is also a considerable disadvantage in your situation—namely this: on account of the lightness of your passionate thoughts, feelings, and impulses, you may treat them indifferently, thinking: it is no great matter, it will pass on its own, one cannot chase after every trifle! This thought, so natural for you, is dangerous. To act that way means leaving the passionate feelings and impulses free to grow and strengthen. They will grow stronger and from small become large. Then they will no longer turn back at a mere disapproving glance from you.

From this, please draw the following conclusion: however small and weak the form in which anything passionate shows itself, one must treat it as though it were the largest and strongest. When you drink water, you remove even the tiniest gnat that has fallen into it; when you get a splinter in your finger, however barely visible it may be on account of its smallness, you hurry to rid yourself of the discomfort it causes; when the tiniest speck of dust falls into your eye and troubles it, you go to great lengths to clear your eye of it as quickly as possible. Resolve to act in exactly the same way with respect to the passions: in however small a form they may appear, hasten to drive them out, and so mercilessly that not a trace of them remains.

How to drive them out? By a hostile movement of anger toward them—by becoming indignant at them. As soon as you notice anything passionate, try quickly to stir up indignation against it. This indignation is the decisive rejection of the passionate. The passionate can only sustain itself by means of sympathy for it, while indignation destroys all sympathy; and so the passionate departs or falls away at its very first appearance. And this is the only place where anger is permissible and beneficial. In all the holy fathers I find that anger was given precisely in order to arm oneself with it against the passionate and sinful movements of the heart and to drive them away with it. To this they also refer the words of the prophet David: ”Be angry, and do not sin” (Ps. 4:4), repeated thereafter by the holy Apostle Paul as well (Eph. 4:26). Be angry at passion—and you will not sin, because when passion has been driven away by anger, every occasion for sin is thereby cut off.

Arm yourself in this way against the passions. Anger toward the passions must have been rooted in you from the very moment you resolved to serve the Lord with all your heart, doing what is pleasing before Him. In that moment you entered into a covenant with God for all eternity. The essence of the covenant is this: your friends are my friends, your enemies are my enemies. And what are the passions to God? Enemies. Throughout all of God’s word, His complete displeasure toward them is declared. ”God resists the proud” (1 Pet. 5:5); covetousness is idolatry (Col. 3:5); ”God has scattered the bones of those who seek to please men” (Ps. 52:5); and so on, and so on. Therefore the Apostle prescribed for Christians regarding the passions: ”let it not even be named among you” (Eph. 5:3). So then, as it ought to be: anger against the passions should flare up in you the moment they show themselves. But on account of our corruption, this does not always happen. That is why anger against the passions requires a specific, free, intentionally directed hostile action against them—effort and exertion.

To succeed in this, immediately after noticing something passionate in oneself one must hasten to recognize and acknowledge it as an enemy—an enemy both of oneself and of God. Why hasten? Because at the very first appearance of anything passionate, it always calls forth a certain sympathy toward it. For self-indulgence continues to live covertly in us for a long time, even after we have openly denied ourselves, given ourselves to God, and are determined not to violate that resolution by so much as a hair. By this hidden self-indulgence—or self-love—the passionate is always received with a certain benevolence, which benevolence is expressed by a greater or lesser degree of sympathy toward it. So one must repel this sympathy and stir up anger. Both are mediated and assisted by the recognition and acknowledgment of an enemy in the passionate thought or impulse that has appeared, however flattering that thought or impulse may be. Once the enmity of a passion is recognized, becoming indignant at it is no longer the least bit difficult. The indignation arises of itself.

To recognize the enemy in what is passionate does not require any great taxing mental labor. It is enough to reawaken the conviction that God is displeased with everything passionate, and therefore displeased also with all who receive and cherish the passionate within themselves. Consequently, the passionate sets God against us and drives us away from Him—and in that lies our ultimate ruin. These thoughts and convictions flash up in an attentive person’s consciousness in a single moment and at once resound in the heart as hostility toward the passionate, as indignation and anger against it. But do not wrestle with the passionate, trying to think up various points of accusation against it. The success of that approach is very doubtful. Meanwhile, while you are running through all your accusations, the defendant—the passion—sits right there, even if on the defendant’s bench, still holding on to its advocate: sympathy. And that means keeping impurity in oneself deliberately, which is dangerous. No—resolve without any deliberation: as soon as you notice anything passionate in yourself, immediately recognize it as an enemy—and become indignant at it.