The Eight Passions (Logismoi)

The eight principal thoughts through which the soul is attacked, as Evagrius of Pontus set them out from the experience of the Egyptian desert: gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, anger, acedia, which is the noonday weariness that makes the cell unbearable, vainglory and pride. St John Cassian carried the list to the West, where it was later folded into seven deadly sins, but the East kept it as a map of a battle rather than a list of crimes. What the Fathers watched was the way a thought becomes a passion, which St John Climacus describes in stages: the provocation, the conversation with it, the consent, the captivity, the struggle, and at last the passion itself, a habit worn into the soul. Each has its remedy, fasting against gluttony, almsgiving against avarice, humility against pride, and the goal is dispassion: not an absence of feeling, but freedom from being ruled by what one feels.