A soul-helping word about the virtues and passions of the soul and body

See also: A helpful and wonderful word about the passions and virtues 1) It should be known that a person, being dual, consisting of soul and body, has dual feelings and corresponding virtues and passions. These five senses are mental and five bodily. The spiritual feelings, which the sages also call powers, are the following: mind, reason, meaning, imagination, feeling; the bodily ones are sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. From them we have twofold virtues and twofold sinful passions; and every person needs to know which virtues and passions are spiritual and which are physical. 2) The spiritual virtues are, firstly, the four most important: courage, wisdom, chastity and truth; then the virtues born from them, which are: faith, hope, love, prayer, humility, meekness, generosity, kindness, goodness, lack of anger, divine reasonableness, quietness, simplicity, serenity, unpretentiousness, arrogance, pridelessness, innocence, artlessness, non-covetousness, compassion, almsgiving, generosity, fearlessness, carelessness, consciousness, modesty, reverence, seeking heavenly blessings, striving for the Kingdom of God, desire for sonship. 3) And the bodily virtues, or, better, the instrument of the virtues, which with reason and according to God, being maintained without any pretense and man-pleasing, lead every person to success in humility and dispassion, are: abstinence, fasting, thirst, vigil, all-night standing, frequent kneeling, denying oneself in baths, contentment with one’s clothes, dry eating, late eating food, fast eating, drinking only water, sleeping on bare ground, poverty in everything, lack of anything superfluous, neglect of external good looks and dapperness, lack of self-pity, solitude, silence, homesteadiness, contentment with little, silence, hardworking handicraft, all suffering (arbitrary bodily deprivation) and all bodily asceticism. All this is extremely necessary and very useful when the body is healthy and subject to strong attacks of bodily passions; when the body is painful and, by God’s grace, is not burdened by its inherent passions, then it is not so much necessary, because in this case holy humility and prayer complete everything. 4) It should now be said about the spiritual and physical passions of sin. The passions of the soul are the following: oblivion, negligence, ignorance of what passions the eye of the soul, that is, the mind, being darkened, falls under the power of all other passions, which are: wickedness, evil, that is, all heresy, blasphemy, anger, rage, bitterness, irascibility, hatred of man, rancor, slander, condemnation, unreasonable sadness, fear, timidity, zeal, envy, envy, vanity, pride, pretense, deceit, infidelity, covetousness, love of things, addiction, inclination to earthly things, despondency, cowardice, ingratitude, grumbling, arrogance, conceit, rudeness, conceit, lust, man-pleasing, guile, shamelessness, insensibility, caresses, suspicion, mockery, double-mindedness, coping with sins, partly inspired by passion, and frequent thinking about them, wandering of thoughts, pride, the parent of all passions, and the root of all evil - love of money, ill-will and evil cunning. 5) The bodily passions are: gluttony, laryngeal madness, sweetness, drunkenness, secret eating, addiction to sensual pleasures, fornication, adultery, depravity, uncleanness, incest, child molestation, bestiality, evil lusts and all unnatural shameful passions, theft, sacrilege, robbery, murder, rest of the body to everyone's satisfaction and satisfaction carnal desires, especially with a healthy body, fortune-telling, witchcraft, conspiracies, prophecies, faith in fate, passion for jewelry, foppishness, effeminacy, rubbing faces, condemnable idleness, empty entertainment, gambling, passionate abuse of worldly pleasures, body-loving life, which, having become satiated with it, the mind becomes earthly and bestial and never again has the desire to ascend to God or desire work virtues. 6) The roots of all passions and, as someone else would say, the original causes are: voluptuousness, love of fame, love of money, from which all evil is born. But a person will not sin any sin if the following omnipotent giants do not first enter into it and take possession of it, as Mark, the wisest of ascetics, says: oblivion, negligence and ignorance; which themselves are generated by voluptuousness and peace of the flesh, love of human glory and addiction to entertainment. The primary cause of all of them and, as it were, the most evil mother, as has already been said, is self-indulgence, or unreasonable love and passionate addiction to the body. I will also add that dissipation and licentiousness of mind, with table gaiety and swearing, cause a lot of evil and many downfalls, as does insolence at everything and laughter. 7) With all this, it is still necessary to know how different and varied passionate lust is and how many pleasures seduce the soul if it, being sober before God, is not imbued with the fear of God and, zealous for the fulfillment of the commandments, is not flaming with love for Christ. Thousands of pleasant things float before the eyes of the soul, attracting them to themselves - faces, silver and gold, sweets and pleasures, fame, riotous joy, power, possessions of everything in abundance, and in seduction they seem to have a brilliant and exalted appearance; so that in fact they are strong to captivate those who are amazed by them, especially if they do not love virtue very much and do not willingly endure difficulties along its paths. And every earthly habit, and every addiction to something sensual, gives pleasure and delight to the addicted, showing that the desired part of his soul with addiction is disposed towards it unreasonably and to his own detriment, for for this reason, in the event of deprivation of the desired thing, the one defeated by the addiction is exposed to anger, sadness and rancor. If, with addiction, habit also takes on power, although not much, then, through this passion hidden in it, it holds the captive with all its power unhealed until the end of life. For lustful pleasure, as has been said, is manifold and is not only enjoyed by fornication and other bodily pleasures, but by all passions in general; just as, on the contrary, to be chaste means not only to abstain from fornication and other sensual pleasures, but also to keep oneself away from any sensual sweetness in general. Why is it that anyone who loves silver and gold, and in general many things, is a lover of voluptuousness, because just as he loves carnal lusts, so this one loves to delight in many things. Even this one is more voluptuous, since he is not so strongly subjected to forced stimulation by nature. And a coachman, for example, is considered ignorant in his business, not the one who cannot cope with a wild and uncontrollable horse, but the one who cannot control a meek and submissive horse. From everything you can see how unnatural the lust for silver and gold is when it receives its stimulation not from nature, but from evil will. Why does one sin unapologetically who spontaneously succumbs to it? Thus, we should undoubtedly agree that voluptuousness is not limited to bodily pleasures and pleasures alone, but takes place in everything to which, in satisfaction of some passion, the soul is arbitrarily addicted with love. 8) To make the difference in sinful passions even clearer, let us distribute them into three parts, or powers, of the soul; For this reason, we enclose the following brief review of them in this regard. The soul is divided into three parts, or forces: thinking, irritable and concupiscible. In the mental system there are the following sins: unbelief, heresy, unreason, blasphemy, ingratitude and association with bodily sins that come from the concupiscible part. To heal and heal these passions, undoubted faith in God, true Orthodox dogmas of faith, free from error, diligent teaching in the words of the Spirit, pure and unceasing prayer and thanksgiving to God serve. The sins of the irritable part are: unmercifulness, hatred, lack of compassion, rancor, envy, murder and incessant plans about all this. Healing and medicine against them are philanthropy, love, benevolence. Sins of the lustful part: gluttony, larynx, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, uncleanness, debauchery, covetousness, vanity, sensual pleasures. Their healing and healing: fasting, abstinence, suffering (arbitrary bodily deprivation), non-covetousness, dependence of property on the poor, desire for eternal future benefits, desire for the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven and the desire for sonship.