on spiritual practices
.. Christians over the centuries have been notorious for seizing spiritual practices as weapons designed to bludgeon human passions into submission. Less noteworthy but more orthodox views held that human passions were dynamic, God-given impulses, presently distorted by sin and therefore prone to wandering off after the wrong things. Eastern scholars Evagrius and Isaac the Syrian considered the passions impulses "to be purified, not killed; to be educated, not eradicated; to be used positively, not negatively." In the Western church, Thomas Aquinas - while subordinating emption to reason at every turn - stressed that the passions were not inherently evil, and could lead to virtue. In other words, spiritual practices did not eliminate human passion, but refocused it on its proper object: God. Especially among inexperienced Christians, spiritual disciplines became the tools that loosened young people's grip on lesser loves so they could freely accept and respond to the passion of God. These disciplines "detached" human passion from sinful objects that corrupted the self, and realigned human desire with God's desire, manifest in the Passion of Christ.
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