The Psyche and Passions

The Church Fathers developed a great and profound anthropological teaching on the psyche and the passions of man. According to them, in the psyche you can distinguish intelligent and passible parts. The passible, again, comprises passionate and desiring parts.

1. The intelligent part contains the reasoning powers of the psyche; the thoughts and cognitive powers.
2. The passionate parts are the positive and negative emotions; love and hate.
3. The desiring part contains the good desires of the virtues and the bad desires for pleasure; for enjoyment, avarice, gluttony, the worship of the flesh and the carnal passions.

Unless these three parts of the psyche, the intelligent, the passionate, and the desiring, are cleansed, man cannot receive the Grace of God within himself, and cannot be deified.

1. The intelligent part is cleansed by watchfulness, which is the continuous guarding of the nous from thoughts, keeping the good thoughts and rejecting the bad.
2. The passionate part, again, is cleansed by love.
3. Finally, the desiring part is cleansed by self-control.

All these parts are both cleansed and sanctified by prayer. - Archimandrite George, Abbott of the Holy Monastery of St. Gregorios on Mt. Athos, from “Theosis-Deification as the Purpose of Man’s Life”

Living in the Intermediate State

Ephesians 4:29-32

"Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you."

John Chrysostom's comments on this passage (Ephesians, Homily 16):

For (Paul) having said, Let all bitterness, and wrath, and clamor, and railing be put away from you, with all malice," he adds, "And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other." For all these are habits and dispositions. And our abandonment of the one thing is not sufficient to settle us in the habitual practice of the other, but there is need again of some fresh impulse, and of an effort not less than that made in our avoidance of evil dispositions, in order to our acquiring good ones…

He who is not our enemy, is not necessarily our friend; but there is an intermediate state, neither of enmity nor of friendship, which is perhaps that in which the greater part of mankind stand toward us. He that is not crying is not therefore necessarily also laughing, but there is a state between the two. And so, I say, is the case here. He that is not "bitter" is not necessarily "kind", neither is he that is not "wrathful" necessarily "tender-hearted"; but there is need of a distinct effort, in order to acquire this excellence.

And now look how the blessed Paul, according to the rules of the best husbandry, thoroughly cleans and works the land entrusted to him by the Husbandman. He has taken away the bad seeds; he now exhorts us to retain the good plants. "Be kind", says he, for if, when the thorns are plucked up, the field remains idle, it will again bear unprofitable weeds. And therefore there is need to preoccupy its unoccupied and fallow state by the setting of good seeds and plants. He takes away "anger", he puts in "kindness"; he takes away "bitterness", he puts in "tender-heartedness"; he extirpates "malice and railing", he plants "forgiveness" in their stead.

For the expression, forgiving one another, is this; be disposed, he means, to forgive one another. And this forgiveness is greater than that which is shown in money-matters. For he indeed who forgives a debt of money to him that has borrowed of him, does, it is true, a noble and admirable deed, but then the kindness is confined to the body, though to himself indeed he repays a full recompense by that benefit which is spiritual and concerns the soul; whereas he who forgives trespasses will be benefiting alike his own soul, and the soul of him who receives the forgiveness.

Bragging Rights

Your hope of fulfillment should be centered in God alone.  When you see any good in yourself, then, don't take it to be your very own, but acknowledge it as a gift from God.  On the other hand you may be sure that any evil you do is always your own and you may safely acknowledge your responsibility.

- from The Benedictine Handbook, chapter 4.

How to Enjoy the Sunset

"For let not the sun," says he, "go down upon your wrath."

Would you have your fill of anger? One hour, or two, or three, is enough for you; let not the sun depart, and leave you both at enmity. It was of God's goodness that he rose: let him not depart, having shone on unworthy men. For if the Lord of His great goodness sent him, and has Himself forgiven you your sins, and yet you forgive not your neighbor, look, how great an evil is this!

And there is yet another besides this. The blessed Paul dreads the night, lest overtaking in solitude him that was wronged, still burning with anger, it should again kindle up the fire. For as long as there are many things in the daytime to banish it, you are free to indulge it; but as soon as ever the evening comes on, be reconciled, extinguish the evil while it is yet fresh; for should night overtake it, the morrow will not avail to extinguish the further evil which will have been collected in the night.

Nay, even though you should cut off the greater portion, and yet not be able to cut off the whole, it will again supply from what is left for the following night, to make the blaze more violent. And just as, should the sun be unable by the heat of the day to soften and disperse that part of the air which has been during the night condensed into cloud, it affords material for a tempest, night overtaking the remainder, and feeding it again with fresh vapors: so also is it in the case of anger.

- John Chrysostom, Ephesians, homily 14