Is there anything between sin and virtue, evil and good?

…among which it is the most harmful… the whole world will not intercede for us at God's judgement… and the sin is that the smoker remembers tobacco more than God… of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage… let him make the decision now… for this we have been commanded: to pray, to ask, to seek, to knock!

“All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any,” says the apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:12).

Tobacco smoking is now widespread throughout the Orthodox world. All classes smoke; people smoke everywhere, in houses and in the streets; even women and young children no longer shy away from it. Today smoking is considered a harmless pleasure — but is it really so? The very fact that the craving for tobacco has become universal and successful, that people are passionately drawn to it, which is often noticed even in children, already points to a sinful and harmful habit. A virtuous custom does not take root so easily or attract each and every one, for “the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21), as the word of God testifies.

“Smoking is neither a sin nor a virtue,” its supporters usually say, fully convinced that smoking is harmless and sinless. But is there anything between sin and virtue, evil and good? Both the moral law and human reason deny it. If we see no benefit or good in it, then it is useless, aimless and empty; and is not wasting the little precious time given us the greatest evil and the gravest harm? In earthly life time is our main capital, teaches worldly wisdom; time is a talent given to man for gaining eternal life, teaches the word of God. For every idle word “that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” (Matt. 12:36), says the Son of God, our Saviour and Judge. And for an idle deed, will not each of us be called to the heaviest account? Smoking, moreover, is not only an idle and worthless occupation, but plainly harmful and sinful. It acts destructively on our body, dulls the powers of the mind and, as a misuse of a substance, plainly contradicts the law of God and the teaching of Christ.

Let us first see how this habit harms our body!

By its properties tobacco belongs to the family of strongly stupefying plants, among which it is the most harmful. Scientists have found in it a very powerful poison, so-called nicotine, whose terrible strength has been proved by many experiments. In France many criminals used nicotine to kill their victims instantly. Dried tobacco prepared for smoking loses some of its strength, but even a solution made from it is so caustic that it is used successfully to remove corns, warts and the like. When one smokes, the residue of tobacco smoke reaches a person's internal organs and forms a coating on them, as a result of which internal sores and diseases appear in the nose and throat; smoking often causes chronic dizziness and vomiting; doctors have proved that smoking dries up the chest and weakens the eyesight, and those given to this habit easily fall ill with consumption. It is telling that workers in tobacco factories and people living in houses near these factories suffer from constant dizziness and vomiting. Now let us be content with what has been said and look at the question from the moral side.

Today there is a widespread opinion that the Orthodox Church does not consider smoking a sin; in support of this, some point out that even some priests smoke. However, such reasoning is entirely groundless. Our holy Church is a stranger to the blind approach of anathematising every newly introduced custom simply because it is new and did not exist in our forefathers' time. Nor does the Church anathematise or forbid any substance if it is used usefully and sensibly. But using it immoderately and without any need is already indulgence in a substance, which the Church has always forbidden and forbids today. The canon says: if anyone drinks water immoderately and vomits because of it, let him be barred from Communion for 40 days and make 100 prostrations for his incontinence. That priests too smoke is a particular case and wilfulness. Among clergymen too you will meet people with weaknesses, and we should not see in this the law of the Church. If a Christian is punished for incontinence with water, all the more is he answerable before the Church and the Lord for the sinful and ruinous habits of smoking, drunkenness, card-playing, slander, anger, pride, vainglory, stinginess, love of money, sloth and fornication. To save us from this spiritual misfortune, the word of God warns and advises us not to be carried away by anything earthly, for if this feeling grows strong in our heart, it may take complete possession of us and drive out of us the love of the Lord. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:13), Christ's beloved disciple John the Theologian tells us. Our misfortune is that we have grown used to listening to human reasoning and not to the word of God. Yet the Lord calls us: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). And the holy king and prophet David prays thus: “For thou, O Lord, wilt light my lamp: my God, thou wilt lighten my darkness” (Ps. 17:28). St Tikhon of Zadonsk writes in his book “A Spiritual Treasure”: “Christians! What a mirror is to the children of this world, let the Gospel and the spotless life of Christ be to us. They look into the mirror to take care of the body and wipe the stain from their face. Let us do the same! Christ, the Son of God, has given us His spotless life as a pattern: ‘I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you’ (John 13:15). So let us look with the eye of the spirit into this spotless mirror: does our life agree with Christ's?! Look often into the holy mirror of Christ's spotless life, and wipe away the stains of your soul with repentance and contrition of heart, and as far as you can, become like the Lord, so that there too you may be like Him. But do not become like the Christians of today: their life for the most part runs contrary to Christ's. ‘Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 2:5).

Then the hierarch admonishes us: “We have not only feeling but reason too; we can judge what is good and what is evil, what will benefit us and what will harm us. We have been given the holy word of God: let us hold people's actions up to Holy Scripture as to the purest mirror, and see in it whether people act according to it or against it. Even if the whole world acts to the contrary, you do what is pleasing to God and profitable to your soul. The whole world will not intercede for you at God's judgement; there you will not be able to say, ‘So-and-so did this.’ From the Judge you will hear only this: Why did you not do what I commanded you? — Be in the world as Lot was in Sodom, where everyone committed lawlessness, but he did not imitate them and did what was pleasing to God. ‘If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth’ (Col. 3:1–2)… Listen attentively, my soul, to these words: ‘For, behold, they that remove themselves far from thee shall perish’ (Ps. 72:27). Fear to be parted from life, lest you remain in death; fear to be parted from the light, lest you remain in darkness. He is dead who is parted from life, and he remains in darkness who has turned his back on the light” — so insistently does St Tikhon of Zadonsk beg us to listen to the word of God. Whoever wishes to save his soul must reflect on this and ask counsel of the Gospel: will it justify our misuse of a substance, contrary to the love of God?

If a Christian pays attention to what the Lord Jesus Christ said — “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” — he will at once understand the harm smoking does to the soul. If, according to the word of God, it is ruinous for the soul to love more than God even those whom we have been commanded to love, what then shall we say of indulgence in a substance “more than God”? When a person becomes enslaved to some sinful habit, it becomes a god for him, and contrary to the Lord's commandment, which says: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” he loves only his habit, remembers only it and thinks about it, while he has abandoned and forgotten his Creator. Just such is the craving for tobacco: this senseless habit gives the person accustomed to it not a minute's peace. And the sin is that the smoker remembers tobacco more than God. He offers sacrifice to tobacco as to the idol of his heart.

There are also very sad cases: some people do not receive the Holy Mysteries of Christ only because they do not want to abstain from tobacco even for one day! Is this not idolatry? Truly, if they do not abandon their voluntary error before the end, they will not see the face of God and eternal life. This is clear from the Lord's stern decision: “For I say unto you, That none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper!” (Luke 14:24). These words are from the Gospel parable of those invited to the royal supper who disregarded the king's invitation. The Lord's decision undoubtedly extends also to those offenders against God who judge so strictly, or count as nothing, the Communion of a sinful person in the Most Holy Mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ. What great mercy such a person deprives himself of! What criminal callousness he shows towards God's incomprehensible love for fallen mankind! Oh, if only the one who so disregards the love of Christ — who disregards the Saviour, Who reveals Himself to each of us in this saving, most holy mystery — would come to his senses before the end! “In what I find you, in that I will judge you,” says the Lord. And the holy apostle Paul, or better to say the Holy Spirit through the mouth of the apostle, testifies as follows: “He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?” (Heb. 10:28–29). When the Lord enters our heart with His Most Pure Body and Blood, granting us thereby the forgiveness of sins and His sweetest grace-filled union with us, does He not show at that moment greater mercy and condescension to each of us than He showed when, for our salvation, He was pleased to be born in the cave of Bethlehem, and the King of heaven lay down in the manger of dumb beasts? But our sin-loving heart, full of passions loathsome to the Lord's most pure eyes, is far more unworthy to receive Him than the cave of Bethlehem and the manger of dumb beasts. During the Lord's earthly life, people marvelled at His so great mercy and condescension towards open sinners hated by all. The Lord went into their houses and even shared their meals, seeking the conversion and salvation of their souls; the same or far greater mercy and condescension the Lord shows today too, when He visits our depraved, sin-loving hearts, worse than those sinners' houses. But those sinners valued the Saviour's visit so highly that they changed at once and became His most zealous followers; while we refuse altogether this most exalted and most blessed visit of His — refuse it precisely because of our attachment to a harmful habit!..

“Therefore my people have been taken captive, because they know not the Lord,” says God through the mouth of the holy prophet Isaiah about the Hebrew people, who at that time outwardly had the true faith but were held captive by many pagan customs. The cause of this soul-destroying evil was their abandoning of the Lord's law and their inattention to the word of God. Today too, among Christians, learning the word of God and reading Holy Scripture have grown very cold; yet it is light and life for us, the only source of knowledge of truth and good. Because we have forgotten the law of the Lord set out in Holy Scripture and have given up prayer, various customs contrary to Christ's teaching have captured us without hindrance and enslaved our heart and mind.

Let us call once more upon the words of St Tikhon of Zadonsk: “I am blind like others, without Thy grace and enlightenment; my sin has blinded me. For this reason Thy goodness, for the enlightenment of me and of all, has granted us through Thy chosen servants and ministers Thy holy word. Like a lamp lit for those who sit in darkness, it gives me light and shows me good and evil, virtue and sin, truth and falsehood, what is pleasing to Thee and what is not, faith and unbelief; thus it drives blindness away from me and enlightens my mind: ‘Thy law is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my paths’ (Ps. 118:105).

“Through long continuance in this or that sin, an inclination to sin arises. Love of the passions is an inner and spiritual idolatry — the servants of the passions worship them as idols with the inner obedience of the heart. For those who please and serve the belly in this way, ‘their God is their belly’ (Phil. 3:19): ‘fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness… is idolatry’ (Col. 3:5); the other passions are meant here too. ‘Whosoever committeth sin (consciously) is the servant of sin’ (John 8:34). ‘Of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage’ (1 Pet. 2:19). For a sin-loving person, the sin he serves is like an idol, and his sin-loving heart like a foul altar; in it is set up a foul idol — sin — to which, instead of calves, sheep and other animals, the person gladly offers in sacrifice his will and obedience. As many times as he consents to the sin he is inclined to, so many times he denies Christ in his heart; and as many times as he actually commits this sin, so many times he offers sacrifice to the idol. How pitiable is a sinful inclination! Here is what St John Chrysostom says: the forms of idolatry are various: one worships mammon (wealth) as lord, the belly as god, another some other most evil passion. You do not sacrifice oxen to them like the pagans, but you do something far worse — you slaughter your soul to them” (from the book “On True Christianity”).

To whoever wishes to be saved, to escape from this pitiable state and rise again in the Lord Jesus Christ, we offer and ask him to accept the following advice: with God's help, to give up the habit of smoking, harmful to the soul; let him make the decision now — while the grace of God is touching his heart and urging him towards saving resurrection. True, the power of habit is so great that it sometimes seems impossible to overcome it; but if you sincerely desire and decide, and ask for God's help, you will certainly overcome it soon. In confirmation of this we will cite the story of a priest: “My parishioner T. K. drank heavily and smoked without stopping. By this way of life he brought his family to utter poverty, although he was a gifted, hard-working and deeply educated man. I often urged him to give up his bad habits, to which he once replied: ‘Father, believe me, my conscience torments and troubles me that I do not follow your good advice; I am already ashamed to meet you and look you in the eye. But, in spite of my weakness, I will try to obey your admonition, and I hope with God's help to give up vodka; but I simply cannot give up smoking. I suffer from breathlessness. When I worked at a stud farm, the horses crushed my chest, and since then I cough constantly; and smoking brings great relief. Especially in the morning, when all the phlegm that has gathered in my chest comes up, I feel very light if I smoke. Besides, the doctors advised me to smoke without fail.’

Very soon I learned that T. K. had given up vodka. Another year passed, and the feast of the Bright Resurrection of Christ drew near. Going round the families before Pascha, as is the custom, with prayer and the cross, I noticed that in T. K.'s house there reigned complete order and well-being. I remembered in what poverty he had lived only a short while before, and said so both to him and to his family. I also reminded T. K. that he still had one great failing, one obvious sin. He understood me and replied: ‘Father, I thank you sincerely for your instruction and good advice. With God's help I gave up smoking too long ago.’ ‘But didn't you assure me that you could not give up tobacco, that smoking brought you relief in your illness?’ ‘Father, that is only a delusion, a great sin and a lie of the devil. I have convinced myself of this. No one will make me change my mind now.’ ‘And how do you feel now?’ I asked. ‘Father, I cannot express my joy and gratitude; since I gave up smoking (though with the greatest effort), not only do I feel well, but my bronchi have cleared, I no longer cough, and the breathlessness has completely gone, which used to torment and torture me terribly when I smoked. Believe me, Father, it is as if I had been born again in soul and body, by the almighty help of God and your fatherly care.’ Now he is one of my best spiritual children and gladly attends every service. There has been more than one such case in our church; seven years ago there were very few non-smokers in the parish, and today, by the grace of God, everyone considers smoking a sin and a vice.”

In conclusion let us recall the everlasting word of the Lord: “Without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). Any effort of ours, the most diligent endeavour, is vain and will bear no fruit without God's help and grace-filled assistance. Therefore first of all we must beseech the Lord with humility and a sense of our own helplessness to help our spiritual infirmity with His almighty power. For it is precisely in our prayerful communion with the Lord that all our strength and success lies. “As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit” (John 15:4–5), the Lord Himself tells us. Our spiritual powers are far too weak to overcome any habit that has taken root in us; our very desire or striving towards good is far too unstable and changeable, as our daily experience constantly confirms. Whoever knows Holy Scripture well knows how wrong is the expression widespread among the people today, and utterly unacceptable to the teaching of the Gospel and the holy Church — “willpower.” Was the holy apostle Peter deceiving the Lord at the Mystical Supper when he testified with such fervour and insistence: “Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death”?! Did he not speak these words from a heart full of sincere love and self-sacrifice? And yet a few hours later how bitterly he wept over his threefold denial of his fervent feeling of loyalty to his beloved Teacher…

So let whoever wishes rely on his “willpower” — we do not recognise it; our only hope is Christ, the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24). To Him we shall cry out together with the holy Church: “Thou art my strength, O Lord! Thou art my power, my God, my joy.”

Let us return once more to the God-wise words of St Tikhon of Zadonsk: “Every ascetic effort and endeavour of ours, whether directed towards doing good or against sin, is powerless without God's help, because we are greatly fallen and helpless. That is why our Saviour told us: ‘Without me ye can do nothing’ (John 15:5). So from Him we must ask and seek every good thing, firmness and strength against sin.” — “A person's life is like a boat sailing on a river. Downstream the boat sails by itself. But it can in no way go against the current, and when it means to go upstream it needs strong oarsmen or a sail that will move it with the help of a following wind. So it is with a person: following his flesh, his whims and passions, following his evil will, he easily lives by himself, just as a ship sails by itself downstream. But to live against our own evil will, to overcome it and submit to the will of God, to labour and struggle against the passions, to crucify and put them to death, and in this way to lead a devout and Christian life — this we are no more able to do than a ship can sail against a river's swift current without oarsmen and sails. A supernatural power must certainly help us and, as with a ship against the river, set us in motion and raise us up against the rush of the passions. All this is done by the grace of God dwelling in a person; by its power a person can do all things — without it he can do nothing. The grace of God is the life of our souls; at every time, hour and minute we need it; without it the soul cannot live. For this we have been commanded to pray — to ask, to seek, to knock. ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth’ (Matt. 7:7–8), says the Lord. But in order to ask so strongly and sincerely for deliverance from spiritual misfortune — from ruinous habits and inclinations — we must discern them in ourselves, condemn them, and see all their vileness, all the weight of the sin piled up by following them. Only then will a sincere desire arise in us to depart from sin, and we shall be able to pray to God from the depth of the soul. The Lord will help only those who seek His help with all their strength and struggle to their last breath, not surrendering to their passions. Self-confidence is full of folly; but excessive reliance on the Lord's help also insults Him, when a person of his own will lingers in sin and consciously surrenders to vicious habits.

Prepared from the brochure “Smoking Is a Sinful Habit,” published with the blessing of the Monastery of St Panteleimon on Mount Athos.