Father Alexander Elchaninov
What strikes one is the baseness and paltriness of the motives of beginning smokers — the wish to act like everyone else, fear of ridicule, the wish to rise in others' eyes. It is at once the psychology of a coward and of a sly one. After this comes estrangement from family and friends. From the aesthetic point of view it is ugliness, especially intolerable in girls. From the psychological point of view, smoking opens the door to everything forbidden and depraved.
Smoking and every kind of narcotic deaden our sense of purity and chastity. The first cigarette is the first fall, the loss of innocence. It is not false puritanism but direct feeling and deep conviction that move me to say this. Ask any smoker and you will be convinced that starting to smoke was in some sense a fall for him.
The stages by which an addiction forms
The human soul is constantly under the influence of suggestions imposed by the dark power — depraved thoughts and desires
The struggle with these “suggestions” is not so very hard if a person's heart is in a state of spiritual sobriety and able to resist “coupling” with them. It is like waving away a mosquito — and it disappears.
But if this “coupling” has already happened, if the mosquito has managed to sink its sting in so deep that it has poisoned the heart, then a person already needs a certain effort to resist the temptation. More dangerous still is captivity. This, as defined by the venerable Philotheus of Sinai, is “the forcible and involuntary carrying off of the heart, its detention in this captivity, and its merging, as it were, into one life with the object that has captured it.”
If the “captivity” becomes prolonged, or often repeated and chronic, the soul passes into the state of passion.
From what has been said, it follows that there are the following steps by which sin enters us: the image — suggestion; attention, interest — coupling; attraction — captivity, passion.
Smoking as one of the vices and a manifestation of a sick will
If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. John 8:36
A very large part of mankind has no free will and, because of sin, is in slavery to Satan.
As Metropolitan Veniamin writes: “We sinners cannot be free, because our passions rule over us. (And) only in the measure that we are freed from them does our freedom grow. Those who live in obedience to another are far freer than the self-willed. And the saints are already free, as far as that is possible for man.
Only God is entirely free… Obedience gives freedom. The proud man is a slave of himself, yet imagines that he is the one who is free… Unbelief is slavery, although people think quite the opposite.”
In the writings of the holy fathers the dark power is held to be the source of the passions. The venerable John (the co-struggler of the venerable Barsanuphius the Great) says that “the passions are demons.”
Schema-archimandrite Sophrony gives this definition of the passions: “Under the influence of demons, the freedom given to man by God suffers defeat, and man falls away from a godly life. Such a state, as a passionate one, is called in ascetic writing ‘passion’; in this name there is reflected, on the one hand, the idea of passion in the sense of passivity and slavery, and on the other, the idea of suffering in the sense of destruction and death.
When some depraved thought or image nests in the soul, a person becomes possessed to one degree or another. The passions are, in essence, “possessions” expressed in different degrees, of different intensity and power.
Thus the passions are diseases of the soul, wounds of the soul of demonic origin, which, when strongly developed, bring about the spiritual death of a person.
Only the Lord frees the human will from slavery to the passions: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:26). And indeed, the only ones truly free in this world are those whose will is freed from slavery to Satan by the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ (John 8:36).
The power of the evil one no longer extends over their souls, while the rest of mankind is unable to escape from his captivity. The difference between the state of the slaves of Satan and the free children of God is immense. The former Satan keeps in subjection by using every device of temptation, enticement and deceit.
The Lord, however, does not want to force the human will. He waits for the free expression of human will: “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9:13). He does not restrict human will in choosing the path to good or evil; and that is why He calls those who follow Him of their own will not slaves but “friends” (John 15:16). In this lies the beauty of the “children of God,” and in this their life differs from the wretched state of the slaves of Satan.
When there is discord and division in the soul, and it wavers between God and Satan, between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between the passions and virtue, then the resultant force of its strivings may approach zero.
In such a case a person shows an infirmity of will — weakness of willpower.
It is quite clear that the treatment of a sick will should not begin with toughening the willpower, although there are many secular methodical manuals on “training the will.” But have there ever been cases where the method of exercises they describe brought anyone great success? How are we to be healed of passion?
An infirm will is healed only by way of purification of the heart, that is, in one case only — through the Holy Spirit's coming to dwell in a person.
As St Ignatius (Brianchaninov) writes: “Every resistance to the demand of a passion weakens it; constant resistance overthrows it. Every yielding to a passion strengthens it; constant yielding to a passion makes a person its slave.”
