Illness of the Soul According to the Orthodox Church If we look carefully at people today and modern society in general, we see immediately that they are dominated by the passion of love of pleasure or self-indulgence. Our age is pleasure-seeking to the highest degree. Human beings have a constant tendency towards this terrible passion, which destroys their whole life and deprives them of the possibility of communion with God. The passion of self-indulgence wrecks the work of salvation. A self-indulgent soul is not fit to become a vessel of the All-Holy Spirit or to perceive the presence of Christ within it. This is a very important issue, and we shall analyse this passion in the following pages. We shall look at how it is expressed, examine its causes and try to describe how we can be delivered and freed from it. We should state at the outset that self-indulgence is one of the main causes of every abnormality in man’s spiritual* [i.e., noetic] and bodily organism. It is the source of all the vices and all the passions that assault both soul and body. St Theodore, Bishop of Edessa, teaches that there are three general passions which give rise to all the others: love of pleasure, love of money and love of praise. Other evil spirits originate from these three, and subsequently “from these arise a great swarm of passions and all manner of evil.” Since love of money and praise include the intense sensual pleasure derived from wealth and glory, we can say that self-indulgence gives birth to all the other passions. Self-indulgence distorts the powers of the soul. St John of Damascus makes the same point. “The roots or primary causes of all these passions are love of sensual pleasure, love of praise and love of material wealth. Every evil has its origin in these.” Anyone who wants to be freed from the passions, which actually means transforming them, must struggle first against the passion of self-indulgence, which is the most fundamental of all. Pleasure is the motivating power that directs the soul. Depending on what sort of pleasure motivates it, the soul either functions unnaturally or in a manner surpassing nature. If we take into account the fact that pleasure also enslaves the nous, we begin to realise the important implications it has for our salvation. 1. Names and Definitions of the Passion Read More... orthognosia.blogspot.ca/2014/10/metropolitan-hierotheos-of-nafpaktos-on.html
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:58:04 +0000
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