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Overcoming the passions is one of the central foci of the Orthodox life. St. Maximos the Confessor defines passion as “an impulse of the soul contrary to nature, as in the case of mindless love or mindless hatred for someone or for some sensible thing.” The passions are, for lack of a better term, our corrupt impulses; they are the lusts and emotions that turn our attention away from God and onto ourselves. Christ listed some of the passions: “From within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness” [Mark 7:22]. St. Peter of Damascus — using the Bible as his basis — created a list of 298 passions, summarizing them as “a falling away from God in all things, utter destruction.”

The Holy Apostle Paul vividly describes the war with passions, as well as the fact that they can only be overcome through the grace of God:

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7:18–25)

Archbishop Paul of Finland notes that passions arise from three sources:

First of all they are aroused by the outer world with its human relationships. A second source of passions is man’s own corrupted nature, that ‘other law in my members at war with the law of my mind’ [Romans 7:23]. It creates the lusts of the flesh, gluttony, drinking, laziness, etc. The third producer of passions is the soul’s enemy, the tempter, the ‘spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places’ [Ephesians 6:12]. That is where unbelief, despondency, pride, and especially blasphemy, come from.

The Orthodox emphasis on overcoming passions demonstrates another significant difference between Orthodoxy and the new American spirituality. Whereas a primary focus of the new American spirituality is general ennui and low self-esteem, Orthodox Christianity realizes that we must begin to address the evil within us — the problems we create — before we can progress spiritually. As we shall see going through these units, the spiritual disciplines are the only truly effective method for overcoming our personal shortcomings.