Source:
"The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle" (2003) by Karen L. King

 
"For Stoics, the ideal state of the wise and virtuous person was apatheia. Apatheia literally means "without passion"; our word "apathy" derives from it. But while "apathy" in English implies passivity and disinterest, the Stoic teaching is much more active, insisting that the passions should be rooted out and destroyed, since evil is caused by the four cardinal passions: pleasure, desire, distress, and fear.

 
There is a tendency in modern thinking to regard feelings as irrational or at least as non-rational. But the Stoics treated the emotions primarily in terms of their cognitive character.¹⁹
They thought that the passions arise not out of feeling, but through ignorance and false belief. The four primary passions derive from the cognitive capacity to distinguish between good and bad, between present and future.

 
In this scheme:

• pleasure is defined as "judgment that what is presently at hand is good";
  
• desire as "judgment that something still in the future is good or valuable";
  
• distress as "judgment that what is presently at hand is bad"; and
  
• fear as "judgment that what is still in the future is bad."²⁰
  

 

Passions:	Good	Bad
Present	Pleasure	Distress
Future	Desire	Fear

 
The diseases of the soul are caused by accepting value judgments that are false. Only sound teaching and accurate knowledge of the truth about Reality can heal people of the diseases that wrack the whole self, body and soul.

 
Hence the cardinal virtues of the wise person are moral insight, courage, self-control, and justice, all of which help a person make correct judgments and instill the character necessary to render those judgments into right behavior and attitudes. Moreover, many Stoics held that because the passions arise out of false ideas that have hardened into fixed dispositions of the soul, they need to be completely wiped out rather than merely moderated. Only complete extirpation of the passions could lead the soul to internal stability and tranquility."

 
 
Notes:
19. The following is based on Nussbaum, Martha "The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions," Apeiron 29 (1987), 129-77, see also Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, TV.22 (in Graver, Cicero on the Emotions, 46-47; see also her notes, 93-94).
20. Nussbaum, Martha "The Stoics on the Extirpation of the Passions," 158-59.

 
 
 
Addendum:

 
Gospel of Thomas #7:
'Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man;
and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man.'

 
If we take "lion" to be figurative to mean "passions", then:

 
'Cursed is the man consumed by passions whose false judgments [over]come the man
and
Blessed is the man
who equips self with moral insight, courage, self-control, and justice,
to instill the character to make one's own correct judgments, and
who is thus not consumed by passions, be they:
- "pleasure" or "distress" concerning matters presently at hand, or
- "desire" or "fear" of something in the future'
i.e. false judgments, be they internally or externally wrought.