Why must healing from drunkenness be sought in the Church?
Why does the Church look with mistrust upon the “worldly” means of fighting alcoholism, holding some of them insufficient and others harmful? Because she knows that drunkenness is not only a sickness; it is a passion, an illness of the sinful soul; and the soul can be healed only by the one Physician of our soul and body — the Lord Jesus Christ. It is to Him that we must turn, and we must seek Him in the Church.
Some ways of treatment by medicines help to remove the body's dependence upon alcohol and to cleanse the body of toxins. There are medicines and methods of using them which make it possible to attain certain successes in this direction; but does this exhaust the matter to the end? In truth the soul of the man remains in its former state, enslaved as before to a sinful craving, and as a result everything begins again...
Attempts outside the Church to destroy the “psychological dependence” upon alcohol, to act upon the soul, are either superficial or occult. An example of the first is the classic repertoire of Soviet narcology, founded upon the training of a “negative conditioned reflex” towards strong drink. And the occult methods are all manner of ways of acting upon the subconscious: classical hypnosis, the notorious “coding”, the “twenty-fifth frame effect”, various forms of meditation and so forth. All these are varieties of what we have already grown used to calling by a particular word: “zombifying”. It is the putting of a programme into a man's soul unnoticed by him and even against his will. All this inevitably lays hands upon the greatest gift of the human person — his freedom.
Such action upon the soul is like theft, and not only because they violate a man's freedom, but also because they break in unlawfully upon the most complex, most delicate, holy order of the human soul and, as a rule, damage it. The consequences cannot be foreseen and are always dreadful. A man may indeed give up drinking for ever, but a few years later he will fall ill of cancer, will die of a stroke (this happens especially often), or will end up in a psychiatric hospital.
It may happen otherwise as well. A man will give up drink, will even mend his health thereby, and may not die of some mishap; but his soul will perish. The passion of drunkenness vanishes, but in its place there remains a worse one (or perhaps several), not at all like drunkenness. In the man there settles either a devilish malice, or a hatred of people, or pride. In place of the one demon of drunkenness seven evil spirits will dwell in the man — “and the last state of that man is worse than the first” (Matt. 12:45); and though it may seem to the drunkard or to those close to him that “it cannot get any worse”, it is not so.
Do not give in to the devil's teaching, do not put your eternal salvation in danger and do not hope to gain the best here, in this earthly life! Seek salvation in the Church — there, where it may be found.
