In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!

Tomorrow, brothers and sisters, we enter into the Passion Week. The Passion of Christ, a Divine Passion, brought to mankind life and restoration of the human nature to its previous unblemished state. Our human passions, on the opposite, lead us to death and degradation.

What does the Church teach us about the human passions and the struggle with them? According to the Fathers of the Church all the variety of sins are results of uncontrolled passions. They distinguished eight different types of passions – gluttony, fornication, love of money, anger, sorrow, despondency, vainglory and pride. There are two types of passions: the natural, which come forth from the natural needs such as gluttony and fornication, and the unnatural i.e. the ones that do not have their roots in one’s nature, such as love of money. Some of them function only in the body and through the body, like gluttony and fornication, while some appear without the body’s cooperation, like despondency and sorrow. Because of that the passions are also divided into carnal and spiritual. The spiritual passions originate in the soul and act upon the soul, sometimes to the detriment of the body.

The eight passions have different sources and different influences, but 6 of them (gluttony, fornication, love of money, anger, sorrow and despondency) are related among themselves so that the excess in one gives rise to the next. Thus gluttony naturally gives rise to lust, lust to love of money, love of money to anger, anger to sorrow and sorrow to despondency. These passions should be fought with in the same order. In order to conquer despondency you must first drive out sorrow; to drive out sorrow you must first drive out anger; to extinguish anger, you must vanquish the love of money; to break free from the love of money you have to subdue carnal lust; to crush carnal lust you need to curb the passion of gluttony. As you can see, brothers and sisters, gluttony is the mother of the rest of the passions. The last two passions, vainglory and pride, are also related – vainglory gives birth to pride and in order to destroy pride you must crush vainglory. At the same time, vainglory and pride are not in any way related to the first six passions. We particularly succumb to these two after we have vanquished the other passions. The eight main passions work in pairs in the following manner: carnal lust joins with gluttony in a special union, anger with love of money, despondency and sorrow, pride with vainglory.

How do we fight the passions? The fight with gluttony is through abstinence from food, but the same rule cannot be applied to everyone because not everyone has the same physical strength. The holy Fathers determined the measure of our abstinence from food as follows: we should stop eating while we still want to eat.

The struggle with fornication is the most prolonged one and very few win in this battle. This passion arises during puberty and does not stop until all the other passions are conquered. Its source is twofold – in the body and in the soul – and therefore it requires dual medicine. Fasting alone is insufficient, it needs to be coupled with a penitent and regretful nature and relentless prayers. Triumph over this passion is possible only through complete cleansing of the heart, for our Lord tells us, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications…” (Mat 15:19) Most of all, what is needed is humility, without which there can be no victory over any passion.

The love of money is an alien passion, which is foreign to our nature. It comes to a person later in life and in the beginning is easy to dislodge. However, should it take root in our heart because of our apathy and continued neglect, it will become more ruinous than the other passions and consequently would be very difficult to remove. Entrenched love of money, according to Apostle Paul, is “a root of all kinds of evil.” (Tim 6:10) It is possible to be sick with love of money without having money. That is why we must be very careful to avoid the sinful desire to be rich.

Anger is given to us by God so that we can use it against our passions and sins, against the manipulations of the devil, but certainly not against our neighbors or enemies. Anger blinds our mind’s eye and we cannot distinguish correctly between good and evil, we lack the maturity to give advice or to hold on firmly to the truth. There are multiple warnings against anger in the Psalms. The way to fight anger is firstly, to realize that it is a sinful tendency and sickness and secondly, to use rightfully our anger against the passion of anger.

The all consuming sorrow, if it concurs us, would weaken and crush us. Having taken away from us all powers of reasoning sorrow will make our soul appear inane and gloomy. Sometimes the sorrow is caused by some type of passion: anger, lust or desire to become rich, other times it is a direct result of the attacks of the enemy. The worst type of sorrow is the one which causes a destructive depression. We fight sorrow by trying to enliven the soul with visions of future joy. Despondency, or melancholy, is akin to sorrow and is experienced mostly by solitary people, it especially disturbs ascetics.

Vainglory often is very difficult to notice and recognize and therefore is hard to protect yourself from. Other passions are plain and unvaried, but vainglory attacks come on behalf of everything – clothing, physical build, voice, work, fasting, praying, knowledge and so on. When we fight other passions they wane and weaken every day. Vainglory though often remains alive by deceiving the person that he had achieved victory over it.

The Fall and the throwing out of Paradise of Adam and Eve were caused by pride. Historically pride was the first passion to emerge. There is no other passion like pride that can eradicate all virtues and deprive person of righteousness. It becomes especially dangerous when it subdues people of a high spiritual standing. The other passions have their limitations, arising against only one selected virtue. For example gluttony violates the demands of temperance, lust defiles chastity, anger drives away patience. As a result being conquered by any one of the passions doesn’t make the person devoid of other virtues. But when pride captures the soul it denies that person the protection of humility, utterly destroying his spiritual framework. By our own efforts we cannot get free from pride, we need the help of God’s grace for that.

Brothers and sisters, it is impossible to overcome any passion without deep and sincere humility. There are three virtues that induce people to crush their passions: the fear of hell’s tortures, the desire to receive the Kingdom of Heaven and the love of virtues. St. Paul urges us, “For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law” (Gal 5:17-18) Since the fall of Adam and Eve there is a continuous war of passions, raging in the members of our body. In that war our task is to follow the Spirit – this is the only way we can overcome our passions. Entering into the Passion Week we need to practice humility, following the humility of our Lord Jesus Christ when He ascended into Calvary. We need to increase our struggle with the human passions, in the foundation of which lies the gluttony. May God help us with that!

Amen.