13. Spiritual and physical virtues. There are four
main (generic) virtues: courage, prudence, chastity, and justice. These give
birth to the following spiritual virtues: faith, hope, love, gift of prayer,
humility, meekness, magnanimity, patience, kindness, knowledge of God, absence
of irritability, simplicity, tranquility, love of truth, freedom, being
non-judgmental, absence of vanity, of envy and of hypocrisy, compassion, mercy,
generosity, consideration, reverence, desire of future eternal benefits, God’s
Kingdom and becoming a son of God. (Ephraim of Syria)
13. When physical virtues are free from any
hypocrisy and flattery, a person grows humble and dispassionate. Physical
virtues are the following: temperance, fasting, hunger and thirst, vigilance,
the making of prostrations, the wearing of plain clothes and eating very simple
food, sleeping on barren earth, poverty, non-accumulation of earthly things,
exhaustion, solitude, silence, contentment with little, quietness, manual work,
all types of voluntary sufferings and every kind of physical ordeal. They are
all quite needed and beneficial for a person in good physical condition
troubled by the passions of the body. When, however, the body is weak, or when
a person, with God’s help, has conquered his passions, physical virtues are not
that important because everything is fulfilled through humility and gratitude
to God. (Ephraim of Syria)
21. Spiritual and physical passions. 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. (Ephraim of Syria)
21. The following are physical passions: gluttony,
voracity, extravagance, drunkenness, different kinds of indulgences,
fornication, adultery, dissoluteness, corruptness, incest, depravity, evil
wishes, all types of unnatural and shameful passions, stealing, sacrilege,
robbery, murder, all appeasements of the body, fulfillment of carnal desires,
especially when the body is healthy, witchcraft, fortune-telling, sorcery,
clairvoyance, foretelling, elegancy, flippancy, indulgence, passion for
sartorial splendor, captivation by cosmetics, passion for gambling, attachment
to earthly pleasures, hedonistic lifestyle that dulls the mind, reducing it to
an animalistic level so that in no way can it lift its gaze toward God and
virtue. The main reasons for and the root of all evil are — indulgences, love
of fame and love of money, from which everything impure is born.
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