Colossenses 3
Gregory of Nyssa · Comentário Patrístico (catena)
Colossenses 3:2
So … if reason instead assumes sway over such emotions, each of them is transmuted to a form of virtue. For anger produces courage, terror caution, fear obedience, hatred aversion from vice, the power of love the desire for what is truly beautiful. High spirit in our character raises our thought above the passions and keeps it from bondage to what is base. Indeed, even the great apostle praises such a form of mental elevation when he bids us constantly to "think those things that are above." So we find that every such motion, when elevated by loftiness of mind, is conformed to the beauty of the divine image.
Colossenses 3:9
And even so we say that the true and perfect soul is the human soul, as is clear from the very nature of its operations in both sensory power and intellect. Anything else that shares in life, because it possesses the power of growth, we call animate by a sort of customary misuse of language, because in these cases the soul does not exist in a perfect condition…. Thus Paul, advising those who were able to hear him to lay hold on perfection, indicates also the mode in which they may attain that object. He tells them that they must "put off the old man" and put on the man "which is renewed after the image of him that created him." Now may we all return to that divine grace in which God at the first created man, when he said, "Let us make man in our image and likeness."