Friday, March 7, 2014
Spiritual and physical passions.( Saint Ephraim the Syrian )
The following are spiritual passions: forgetting God, laziness and ignorance (of the Christian faith). These three passions obscure the spiritual eye — reason, and the person succumbs to the rule of other passions, namely: impiety, heresy, blasphemy, irritability, anger, sorrow, irascibility, hatred, maliciousness, slander, judging others, illogical sorrow, fear, dissension, jealousy, envy, vainglory, hypocrisy, lies, unbelief, foolishness, indiscrimination, short-sightedness, insatiability, love of acquiring things, laziness, passion for the earthly things, depression, faintheartedness, ingratitude, grumbling, presumptuousness, conceit, vehemence, haughtiness, love of power, flattery, slyness, shamelessness, indifference, effeminacy, dissimulation, mockery, two-facedness, assenting to sin, continuous thoughts of sin, meandering thoughts, self-love (mother of everything evil), love of money (root of all iniquities and passions), evil nature and deceit.
Saint Ephraim the Syrian