What dangers for humans lurk in passions

Pride. Hieronymus Bosch (fragment of the painting "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things," 1475-1480). Photo: ppt-online.org

Passions are the pathology of the personality. In the most general sense, they are reduced to three pillars on which this pathology stands. Sensuality encompasses all forms of physical and mental pleasures and is the disease of the desirous part of the soul. Avarice is the pathology of the irascible part of the soul, including an insatiable attachment to the things and values of the transient world. Vainglory is the disease of the rational part of the soul, the foundation of our old self, and the manifestation of pride and egoism.

Pride is the pathology of the intellectual power, where the energy of the mind changes its natural direction and, detached from God, confines itself within the limits of the restricted human "I". Our love of the world stands on these three pillars. The essence of spiritual life is to uproot the love of the world. The struggle is conducted on two fronts – external (asceticism) and internal (spiritual practice).

A person is not created as a self-sufficient system: we lack personal autonomy. Just as our body depends on food, water, and air, our soul depends on spiritual nourishment. Without the ability to generate the driving force of existence from within, a person must draw spiritual energy from an external source, which is our Creator, nourishing us with uncreated life-giving power.

We are now faced with a choice between two fundamentally different and mutually exclusive principles: between creation and destruction, between life and death, between hell and the Kingdom of God. There is no third option! There is either life-creating divine grace or destructive demonic force. Standing still, remaining static, is impossible, as time flows incessantly, and if one does not make an effort to ascend, one inevitably slides down.

We are created from nothing, meaning that in our essence we are absolute zero, suspended between the abyss of hellish non-being and the infinite, eternal life.

A short life is a time to make up one's mind. Serving two masters, God and Satan, "life" and "death", at the same time is impossible, no matter how hard we try. "He who serves both God and the devil tries to bargain with both, but neither will ever concede." If we are not with God, then we are unequivocally with the devil, not "on our own." We live between two poles: "the perfect and saving will of God and the devil's will, which seeks our destruction." We are granted "gnomic" freedom (γνωμη – opinion, inclination, intention) to choose.

This freedom is not available to demons and angels, as they no longer waver between good and evil. Angels are exclusively devoted to good, while demons are exclusively devoted to evil. Only humans retain gnomic freedom.

In God, there is only absolute good, with not the slightest trace of evil.

In the devil, there is only evil, with not the slightest trace of good.

The essence of God is simple – absolute good, and the essence of the devil is also simple – absolute evil. Therefore, we are bound to align with one of these poles. The Fathers unequivocally assert: "If God is not acting in us, then everything we do is a sin." There are no half-measures or intermediate options. Any excuses like "I live like everyone else," "what could I have done?," "everyone lives this way," "it's customary," or "what will people think?" mean only one thing: we have sided with Satan, and there's no point in trying to justify ourselves. Doing so before ourselves is foolish, and both God and the devil already understand everything.

Even the smallest sin is a communication of the soul with hell. The primary source of our connection with both God and Satan is our thought (whether it is acted upon or remains in the mind). Therefore, "there is no good thought that does not come from God, and no evil thought that does not come from the devil," – the gnomic choice is ours alone.

There is no void in either the physical or spiritual world: if there is no God in the heart, Satan will inevitably reside there

Therefore, on a social level, it is essential to understand that any ideology, teaching, political doctrine, philosophical system, or worldview model that does not confess Christ, His values, His teachings, His commandments, carries within it the spirit of the Antichrist, no matter how it is dressed up in a humanitarian or universally valuable guise.

The Fall, this key moment of our catastrophe, began with the devil seizing our reason, suggesting to us the idea that there could be some other good apart from or outside of God. The same meaning is carried by the modern ideology of consumerism: your happiness is comfort and security. What happens next is clear even to a child.

The net has already been cast over the entire world, it has entered almost every home, and is connected to every mobile phone. The communication is established – all that remains is to connect the soul to it. The best way to do this is to eliminate cash and tie all transactions to a bank card, the card to the person, and the person to the system-network. To make it so that basic needs for food and security can only be met through worship and reverence of the beast.

The Church is an assembly. It can be around God or around the devil. Only God does not force our will, unlike Satan, who prepares for us reliable, unbreakable, wireless chains. But the choice will always remain ours, even if it is a choice between life and death.

For this trap to work "ironclad", we need to be gradually prepared for the New World Order. To this end, under the guise of ideologies such as liberalism, humanism, democracy, communism, Nazism (in any of its forms), fascism, and others, a demon-like image of man is being formed.

One only needs to soberly look at the fruits that humanity has grown in its culture.

Only a demon-like being can derive pleasure from horror movies or bullfights. What kind of soul can find enjoyment in watching scenes involving violence, blood, and the suffering of living beings, whether humans or animals? Today, it is impossible to imagine any advertisement, film, or music video without an erotic or even pornographic element.

Is it necessary to explain that such spectacles are unbearable for a person with a healthy soul? Not due to faint-heartedness or nervousness, but because a healthy soul involuntarily suffers when it encounters "art" where demons manifest their energies, embodied in our bodies. The soul senses the breath of the underworld in this. The main problem is not that demons want to corrupt us and make us like them, but that people themselves seek this with insatiable greed. The devil merely offers, and the person makes their choice.

Addiction to sin is not just a lack of goodness or a decline in morality; it is real interaction with the demonic world. Modern culture and the ideology of consumerism are a liturgy (a common cause) of the devil with people. And if not long ago its extreme demonic forms were still somehow condemned at the level of universal human morality, today they are cultivated and accepted as the norm of life.

Sin is opposition to God through the denial of commandments, and when an unrepentant sinner carries this opposition into eternity, they forever turn into a human-demon. The general demonization of humanity in terms of tastes, interests, addictions, morals, ethics, and the like has, in our opinion, already reached a critical mass, indicating that humanity as a whole has crossed the line of no return to Christianity and to Christ.

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