Sadness (lupe) appears to be a state of soul which, beside the simple meaning of the word, involves discouragement, debility, psychic heaviness and sorrow, dejection, distress, oppression, and depression most often accompanied by anxiety and even with anguish.
This condition can have many causes, but it always involves a pathological reaction of the soul’s irascible (thumos) and/or despairing faculty (epithumia), and as such is essentially tied to concupiscence or anger. ‘Sadness,’ Evagrius tells us, ‘tends to come up at times because of the deprivation of one’s desires (steresis ton epithumion). On other occasions, it accompanies anger. But it can also be a result of the direct action of demons on the soul, or it may even arise for no apparent reason.
First Cause—The Frustration of Desires
Evagrius tells us ‘Sadness is formed from an unsatisfied carnal desire.’ St. John Cassian likewise notes that sadness ‘sometimes results when we see ourselves deceived with regard to some hope,’ and that one of its chief kinds follows from ‘a desire that has been thwarted.’ In that ‘every desire is tied to a passion,’ every passion is prone to produce sadness. According to Evagrius: ‘whoever loves the world will often be sad.’
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet
Category: TEMPTATION & LUST & VIRGINITY
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Another point of the utmost importance is that you have lately been tossed and harassed by sexual lusts. This always happens when our practices of the Prayer are beyond our abilities and capacities. Read, in the foreword to Philotheus of Sinai,” how easily the sensation of heat, caused by prayer, can turn to sexual lust, setting the blind heart on fire, filling the mind with the smoke of lascivious images and thoughts, and causing flesh to yearn for the touch of flesh.
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He who becomes weak and falls, let him not postpone his repentance, lest he wallow more in sin and his determination become weaker. Also, let him not be ashamed, because of his sin, to offer his prayer to God in its appointed time, even if this were after falling into sin immediately, claiming that his mind and conscience have become defiled, and it would not be fitting for him to stand before God and lift up his hands to heaven. These, my brother, are demonic thoughts, with which the devil dominates you through his cunning, so that you may not run away from him quickly.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Pray
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“Desire is a mystery, and sex is its funeral,” remarks Parthenope at one point. But longing for her beauty to remain closed off to others—a vision to be admired, not a spectacle to be consumed—leaves her as alienated from the human experience as the timeless deities to which she’s compared.
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Your past and present torments and sufferings are poured down upon you to test your faith and steel it; they also work to curb your lusts and passions. Humble yourself. God succours the humble. Judgment of others, insistence on their shortcomings, can only increase the bitterness of your sorrow. Choose the better part.
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He who accepts present afflictions in the expectation of future blessings has found knowledge of the truth; and he will easily be freed from anger and remorse.
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Desire and distress subsist in the soul; sensual pleasure and pain in the body. Sensual pleasure gives rise to pain, and pain to sensual pleasure (for, wanting to escape the wearisome feeling of pain, we take refuge in sensual pleasure); while desire results in distress.
—Ilias the Presbyter -
Trials and temptations subject to our volition are chiefly caused by health, wealth and reputation, and those beyond our control by sickness, material losses and slander. Some people are helped by these things, others are destroyed by them.
—Ilias the Presbyter
SO GOOD QUOTES 