Accomplices
Inside us evil is at work suggesting unworthy inclinations. However, it is not in us in the same way as, to take an example, water mixes with wine. Evil is in us without being mixed with good.
We are a field in which wheat and weeds are growing separately. We are a house in which there is a thief, but also the owner. We are a spring which rises from the middle of the mud, but pours out pure water.
All the same, it is enough to stir up the mud and the spring is fouled. It is the same with the soul. If the evil is spread, it forms a unity with the soul and makes it dirty. With our consent, evil is united with the soul; they become accomplices.
Yet there comes a moment when the soul can free itself and remain separate again: in repentance, contrition, prayer, recourse to God. The soul could not benefit from these habits if it were always sunk in evil.
It is like marriage. A woman is united with a man and they become one flesh. But when one of them dies, the other is left alone.
But union with the Holy Spirit is complete. So let us become a single spirit with him. Let us be wholly absorbed by grace.
Pseudo-Marcarius Homily 16, I (PG34, 613)
Right Use not Misuse
It is important to understand the right use of external objects and pictures of them in our imagination.
The reasonable use of them produces for its fruit the virtues of chastity, charity and right knowledge.
Their unreasonable use results in debauchery, hatred and ignorance.
It is through the measure” in which we misuse the powers of the soul, namely its desire, emotion, reason, that the vices install themselves: ignorance and folly in the reasoning faculty, hatred and debauchery in the desires and emotions. Their right use, on the contrary, produces right knowledge and prudence, charity and chastity.
Nothing that God has created is in itself bad. Food is not bad, gluttony is; the procreation of children is not bad, lechery is; wealth is not bad, avarice is; glory is not bad, only vainglory is.
So you see nothing is bad in itself, only the misuse of it, which is the soul’s negligence in cultivating its true nature.
Maximus the Confessor Centuries on Charity, 3, I (SC9, p.123)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
