The cause of our gloominess is nowhere outside ourselves, says St. John Cas­sian. Depression grows like a weed from the seeds of our own faults. Sometimes depression is the fault of previous anger, or springs from the desire of some gain that has not been realized, when someone has found that he has failed in his hope of getting the things he had planned to get. But sometimes, without any apparent reason for our being driven to fall into this... Read more

We often say that someone has “made” us angry. Don’t blame someone else, says St. John Cassian. You can’t control the actions of others, but you have control over your own virtue. Sometimes, when we have been overcome by pride or impatience, and we want to improve our rough and bearish manners, we complain that we require solitude—as if we should find the virtue of patience there where nobody provokes us. We apologize for our carelessness, and say that the... Read more

The passion of anger blinds us and sends us tumbling into sin, says St. John Cassian. But there is one right use for it. We should be very angry at our own failings, and that anger should lead us to overcome them. From almost every cause the emotion of wrath boils over, and blinds the eyes of the soul, and, bringing the deadly beam of a worse disease over the keen­ness of our sight, prevents us from seeing the sun... Read more

Some people, says St. John Cassian, try to excuse their anger by saying that righteous anger is perfectly fine. Doesn’t the Bible talk a lot about God’s “wrath”? But God is not subject to human passions. You can’t justify your own sin by an appeal to the metaphorical language of Scripture. We have heard some people trying to excuse this most pernicious disease of the soul (anger), trying to extenuate it by a rather shocking way of interpreting Scripture. They... Read more