How to fight the one who hides behind the tobacco smoke
“So petty a sin as tobacco,” wrote Archbishop John (Shakhovskoy), “has grown into such a habit of human society that society provides every condition for it. Where can a cigarette not be found! You will meet an ashtray everywhere; everywhere there are special rooms, carriages and compartments set aside for smoking, ‘for smokers.’ It would be no exaggeration to say that the whole world is one room — or rather one enormous carriage ‘for smokers’ in interstellar space. Everyone smokes — calmly commits the petty sin: old and young, sick and healthy, learned and unlearned. A criminal is allowed a cigarette before his execution. As if there were too little air in the atmosphere, or it were too colourless. As if we had to make ourselves some sort of smoky, poisoned air and breathe and breathe this poison, and take pleasure in this smoke — and so everyone takes pleasure in it, to the point that a ‘non-smoker’ is as rare as ‘a person who never lies’ or ‘a person who does not exalt himself.’ The tobacco market is one of the most important in world trade, and every year it gives millions and millions of people the chance to breathe in this poisonous air and stupefy their heads and whole bodies with its narcotic.”
These words of the archbishop obviously refer first of all to the Western society in which his whole conscious life was spent. The smoking cigarette or cigar in the well-groomed hand of a successful businessman, loaded with gold rings, is rightly perceived by us as a symbol of Western civilisation, with its corrupting and draining effect on man. Cigarette advertising is one of the chief signs of a sad phenomenon of the post-perestroika period — the energetic expansion of the West. Among these advertisements, which promise to turn our life into an unbroken chain of happy moments, there are many posters praising the merits of this or that cigarette. “A date with America,” “The real America,” proclaim the slogans on enormous billboards showing vistas of Manhattan skyscrapers, cowboys and motorcyclists against the mountain landscapes of the American Far West. America — this word has become a magic formula, an incantation that has taken hold of people's hearts and minds. America, the land of success, the place where everything best that exists on earth is gathered together. Where real people live real lives and buy American cigarettes with American dollars.
If the cigarette attracts people by itself and suffers no shortage of consumers, its union with “the myth of real American prosperity” makes things worse still and multiplies the number of those who want to take a “beautiful” and “genuine” drag.
The history of cigarette smoking is telling. Its origin confirms that this passion could have taken root in society only with the help of demons. That is exactly why no tortures or executions could wean people from this harmful habit.
When Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador on 12 October 1492, he and his companions were struck by an unusual sight: the natives were letting smoke out of their mouths and noses. The Indians were celebrating a “holy” festival at which they smoked a special herb — to the point of complete stupefaction. It should be noted that in this state they entered into contact with demons and afterwards told what the “great spirit” had said to them. On returning home, the Spanish sailors introduced European society to this “pleasure.” Thus the custom of smoking tobacco has its origin in the service of idols.
And so, with the participation of demons and their secret assistance, a fever of tobacco smoking began throughout Europe and even Asia. What did the governments and clergy not do to put a stop to this evil — excommunication was imposed, the guilty were executed and their heads displayed with pipes stuck in their mouths, lips and noses were cut off, tobacco merchants were burned alive, nostrils were slit and noses cut, and offenders exiled.
The harsh measures imposed by the rulers of various countries still could not stop the rapid growth of this passion, but in society there were always sensible people who tried in one way or another to limit the universal evil, exposing all the ruinous effect of this harmful habit. It seems that on this ground legends about the origin of tobacco arose in Russia. According to one tradition, tobacco grew from the grave of those guilty of incest (a sister and brother); according to another, from the head of a harlot.
Not without reason has tobacco's nickname — “Satan's incense” — taken firm root. It is connected with a tradition according to which, when canonical worship with the use of incense was established in the Old Testament Church, in the time of the prophet Moses (the 19th century before the Nativity of Christ), Satan — who in his hatred of God can never rise above a caricatured imitation of God's works — made the demons subject to him cense him with their own lips. It is therefore no accident that the extremely negative attitude towards smoking came first of all from the clergy. The habit of smoking and taking snuff was condemned by the clergy as early as the time of Peter the Great as a godless and devilish thing.
And so, when a Russian merchant bought from the government, before Peter's journey abroad in 1697, the monopoly on selling tobacco, Patriarch Adrian excommunicated him together with his whole family and even his descendants, cursing his whole line for ever. Until the end of the 17th century tobacco was forbidden in Russia by the patriarch as something unclean and anti-religious, and in the words of one traveller, “to this day no priest will enter a room smoked with tobacco.” To this one may add that the best Russian hierarchs of the 17th to 19th centuries, though they were lenient towards the vice of smoking among the laity (evidently because of how universal this evil had become), were very strict when it came to clergy, and especially to priests.
What is smoking from the spiritual point of view, and what harm does it do to a person's soul and body? It is a sin whose source lies in the inclination to self-gratification. Whatever a person smokes for — to relieve nervous or mental tension, to establish friendly or business relations, to get extra pleasure while intoxicated with alcohol (many smoke only when they drink), and finally for illusory self-assertion (which is what turns adolescents into smokers), or as part of a pagan ritual — it is a clouding of a person's senses and mind. Seeming pleasant, it arouses the wish to repeat it, and so a habit gradually forms — the ruinous passion wraps the wretched smoker in its net.
Smoking is a passion of the soul: by nature the desire to smoke is not proper to man, as are, for example, eating, drinking and having a family. It can probably be said that smoking is a kind of antipode of prayer. Prayer is called by the holy fathers the breathing of the soul. By concentrating a person's attention within himself and in God, it brings him true peace, produces cleansing of mind and heart, and a sense of spiritual strength and vigour.
Smoking is connected with the breathing of the body and produces a surrogate of these sensations. The very symbol of prayer — the burning of fragrant incense — shows very plainly the opposition between the fragrance of censing with incense and the use of the devil's stinking weed. It is no accident that the greatest man of prayer of all Russia, the holy and righteous John of Kronstadt, denounces the passion of smoking with such force: “Man has distorted even bodily pleasures themselves… for the sake of taste, and partly for breathing, he has invented, and almost without ceasing lets out, a pungent and foul-smelling smoke, offering it as a constant sacrifice to the demon living in the body; with this smoke he saturates the air of his dwelling and outside it, and above all he himself is saturated with this foul smell — and this unceasing coarsening of his own senses and heart, constantly swallowed up by smoke, cannot but affect the delicacy of the heart's feelings; it gives them a carnal, coarse and sensual character.”
Let us give an example from the life of the Athonite monk Silouan, which is interesting in that the elder's companion, a convinced smoker, admits that prayer and smoking are incompatible.
In 1905 Father Silouan spent several months in Russia, often travelling on pilgrimage to the monasteries. On one such journey he took a seat in the train opposite a merchant, who with a friendly gesture opened his silver cigarette case and offered him a cigarette. Father Silouan thanked him and declined to take it. Then the merchant began to talk: “Is it not because you hold this to be a sin, Father, that you refuse? But smoking often helps in an active life; it is good to break off from strenuous work and rest a few minutes. Over a cigarette it is convenient to carry on business or friendly talk, and it helps altogether in the course of life…” — and further, trying to persuade Father Silouan to take a cigarette, he went on speaking in favour of smoking. Then Father Silouan made up his mind to say: “Sir, before you light your cigarette, pray; say one ‘Our Father.’” To this the merchant answered: “Praying before a smoke somehow does not come off.” Father Silouan observed in reply: “Then every work before which an untroubled prayer does not come off is better left undone.”
On the harm smoking does to a person's soul and body, it is perhaps best to speak in the words of St Ambrose of Optina: “Tobacco,” he writes, “slackens the soul, multiplies and strengthens the passions, darkens the mind and destroys bodily health by a slow death. Irritability and melancholy are the result of a soul made sick by smoking tobacco.”
Smoking can be considered both murder and suicide, for two reasons. First, by polluting the surrounding air with tobacco smoke, the smoker — together with car exhausts and the chimneys of huge factories — makes it less fit for normal breathing, and not of some vague, abstract humanity, but of the people in his immediate vicinity; and if the presence of industrial and transport waste in the air can still be partly justified by activity useful to people, the smokiness of our flats, offices and other places we owe to that “sinless” pleasure which, for some reason, some of those close to us are unable to give up. Is this not a slow, even if indirect, harm done to someone else's health? We will not dwell on the medical evidence of the harm tobacco smoke does to all who breathe it in. Such evidence is abundant.
What is tobacco? It is 750 different substances, and all of them harmful. Imagine a person who comes into a railway carriage and sprays insecticide into the air from a can. What would you do? You would start shouting that you were being poisoned and demand that it be forbidden. When someone smokes near you and you feel ill and say: “Excuse me, but there used to be a custom of asking whether one might smoke,” you are told (at best): what a delicate little thing you are. That is, people are actively destroying their own health and that of those around them.
Smokers on the whole work worse and less, because of smoking breaks. They fall ill more often, more seriously and for longer. They die earlier. Besides, a third of all fires — this has now been precisely established — are caused by them.
The second reason that allows us to consider smoking a breach of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is spiritual. As we noted above, smoking is a passion. What is a passion in general, and what does the word mean? In the writings of the fathers, a passion is a sin-bearing, foul inclination which, through long following of it, has as it were grown into the soul, turned into a habit, a “second nature,” and the action of this habit in the soul is so strong that no logical reasoning, even the most convincing, can stop a person from fulfilling the habitual sinful desire. Neither the persuasion of the most authoritative people, nor hindering circumstances, nor even the physical impossibility of committing the sin in deed can bar the way to the fulfilment of the passion, at least at the level of daydreaming about a sinful pleasure that is for some reason out of reach. It turns out that a person directs all his efforts, all his thoughts, all his strength and desires to getting the pleasure to which, by force of habit, his soul is tied, and the strongest argument — the witness of conscience — becomes ineffective, running up against a wall of numerous, varied and most cunning self-justifications that we invent so as somehow not to admit that our habit, our addiction, contains sin, however much we want to think so. That is why all arguments against smoking are powerless; even the most humiliating facts have helped very little to cure the passion of smoking. For example, the fact that Adolf Hitler considered smoking (along with drunkenness, the spread of pornography and the permitting of abortion) the most powerful weapon for enslaving the people in the occupied territories: “Only vodka and tobacco,” he urged in his declaration of 1942.
The passion of smoking is especially ruinous if it takes hold from youth. Let us give a conversation of the Optina elder Nectarius with S. Nilus about an episode from his childhood, in which he tells how he got used to smoking tobacco in secret from his mother:
“And then my mother noticed that I smelled of tobacco…
— What's this, Kolya (in the world I was called Nicholas), have you started smoking? — my mother would ask.
— What are you saying, Mummy, — I would tell her, — I never thought of it. And then I'd slip off to one side, as if on some business… Once or twice I got away with it, and then I was caught: one day I had only just started smoking some borrowed tobacco when Mummy was standing over me, as if someone had called her.
— Were you smoking just now? — she asks. Again I say:
— No, Mummy. No indeed, when I reeked of tobacco a mile off. Mother didn't say a word, but she gave me such a sorrowful look that everything inside me turned over. She went away from me and off somewhere about her business, and I sat down in a hidden corner and began to cry inconsolably because I had grieved my mother — more than that, not only grieved her, but deceived her and told her a lie. I cannot even say how painful it was for me! The day passed and night came, but I didn't even think of sleeping: I lie in my bed and keep sobbing, lie there and sob. Mother heard. — What's the matter, Kolya, are you crying? — No, Mummy. — Then why aren't you asleep?
With these words Mother got up and lit the lamp, and my pillow was wet… And if you could have seen what went on between us! We both cried our fill and made peace! That was the end of my fun” with smoking.
In the story above we want to underline the alarm, reaching almost to horror, of a devout mother who understood perfectly well what a ruinous trap the supposedly harmless “fun” was preparing for her son.
The aim of this book is not to condemn or frighten anyone, but the wish to help people free themselves and others from this passion. Smoking is a passion of the soul and is cured by the appropriate means. Let us give the advice of the great Optina father, St Ambrose. To a resident of Petersburg, Alexei Stepanovich Mayorov, who turned to him for advice on how to give up smoking, the elder wrote: “Make a detailed confession, starting from the age of 7 up to the present day, and receive Communion of the Holy Mysteries; and every day, standing, read a chapter of the Gospel or more; and when melancholy comes upon you, read again, or instead, in private, make 33 full prostrations in memory of the Saviour's earthly life and in honour of the Holy Trinity.”
Alexei Stepanovich read the letter and lit a cigarette, but suddenly felt a severe headache and at the same time a revulsion for tobacco smoke, and he did not smoke again that night. The next day he made to smoke four times out of habit, but now mechanically; he could not even swallow the smoke because of the severe headache, and he easily broke the habit of smoking, whereas in the previous 2 years, however much he forced himself, it had been in vain. It was then that he felt his illness and realised his own powerlessness in the work of rooting out this passion. “On the advice of a good man,” Mayorov writes, “I turned to Father Ambrose with sincere repentance and asked him to pray for me. Later, when I came to him to thank him in person, he touched my aching head, and since then I have not felt any headache.”
We should not think that miraculous healing from smoking is a thing of the past. The all-merciful Lord is ready in every age to stretch out a helping hand to those who want to be healed. An amazing story was told us on 27 November 1994 by Mother Olympiada, abbess of the Pokrov Convent. A man who had smoked for 20 years received miraculous healing from the disease of smoking at the holy relics of the blessed Xenia of Petersburg.
The director of a large firm, of handsome, cultured appearance, Mikhail Mikhailovich (that was the man's name) is a devotee and benefactor of the convent. At the time of his healing he was 35. A girl (now a nun) lives in the convent. She was born with one leg. In the year of the second uncovering of the relics of St Seraphim of Sarov (1991) she was 10 years old. The sisters went in groups to venerate the newly uncovered relics of St Seraphim of Sarov, which were then resting in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Petersburg. The nuns wanted to take Nastenka with them, but someone had to carry her, and they could not manage it. So they asked their benefactor to help her get to the relics, carrying her in his arms and on his shoulders.
On the train Mikhail went out very often to the vestibule to smoke. Mother Olympiada, who wanted all the best for this respected man, said to him with concern: “What is this, Mikhail Mikhailovich, that you smoke so much? You are a man with higher education, yet you smoke in the vestibule and can't help overhearing indecent talk.”
“Forgive me, Mother,” he answered, “but I've been smoking for 20 years! I smoke about 2 packs a day, depending on what work I have. When I'm worried about something or working a lot, I smoke more.”
They arrived in Piter. After venerating the relics of St Seraphim of Sarov, the nuns wanted to go to the Smolensk Cemetery, to the grave of the holy and blessed Mother Xenia. As soon as they came out of the Lavra's enclosure, Mikhail lit up, saying: “I can't hold out any longer.”
When they reached the cemetery and went into the chapel, a service of intercession was going on. The warmth of prayer was all around, candles and lamps were burning, and — most important of all — the souls of those who had come were filled with a special feeling of love and quiet joy, as usually happens at the relics of the blessed Xenia. Mother Olympiada turned to Mikhail: “Here is help for you from the holy and blessed Xenia to give up smoking! She helps married people a great deal.”
He fell on his knees on the marble tomb, laid his head on the slab and stayed motionless for 15 minutes, as if lost to the world. What feeling filled this man of high standing, so unexpectedly prostrate like a child at the relics of the blessed Xenia? Mikhail did not even notice the service come to an end.
Mother Olympiada did not see Mikhail all day. Only in the evening, on the train, did she notice with surprise that he was not going out to the vestibule to smoke. The mother asked: “What has happened to you?” Mikhail, as if afraid of something, put his finger to his lips and said softly: “Shh! Mother, I haven't smoked yet today.” They arrived in Riga, and when they were saying goodbye Mother Olympiada asked: “What sort of mood are you in?” He said with a hidden smile: “Thank God, I haven't smoked yet.” Three days later Mikhail shouted at the top of his voice down the telephone: “I don't smoke!” And in his office he hung up a sign reading: “Please do not smoke!”
His colleagues, who were also long-time smokers, shrugged their shoulders, astonished at what had happened; but more astonishing still was that at home whole clouds of tobacco smoke awaited him, let out by his wife, who, as soon as she learned what had happened to him in Piter, cried out: “Why didn't you take me to the blessed Xenia too? I want to give up smoking too, and I can't!” A year later Mother Olympiada rang Mikhail. He gladdened the mother with the news that he had not smoked for a year since then.
But how is it possible for a man who has smoked two packs a day for 20 years to give up smoking in one instant? It is a manifest miracle of God, worked through the intercession and help of the holy and blessed Mother Xenia of Petersburg!
Some Athonite monks are so radical that they do not even accept pilgrims who smoke for confession, holding that if a person cannot give up smoking, how will he manage to be cleansed of other sinful inclinations? And for those to whom smoking seems a small sin, let us give two cases that show how loathsome it is before God.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Turks drove out the greater part of the Orthodox Greeks from the districts of Asia Minor, the following happened near Smyrna. A certain Turkish meat-seller had an old icon of the Mother of God, which he used as a board for chopping meat. An Orthodox man, seeing this, resolved to put a stop to such open dishonouring of a holy thing, and bought the icon along with the meat, as an ordinary board. Having brought it home, he cleaned it and hung it on the wall of his sitting room. Unhappily, he was a smoker. A few days later the Most Holy Virgin appeared to him in sleep and warned him: if he did not cease dishonouring Her icon with cigarette smoke, it were better that he give it back to the Turk. The Mother of God chose rather that the Turk should chop meat upon it than that an Orthodox Christian should cense Her with the foul “incense of Satan.” The said Christian understood his sin and never smoked again.
And quite recently the monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra saw this revelation: smokers were being cruelly tormented by demons, who thrust extinguished cigarettes into their mouths. It is known that if a soul has not been cleansed of a passion, the passion remains with it after death too, while the means of satisfying it are taken away.
After all this, we leave it to you to judge how “small” a sin smoking is.
And to whoever decides to get rid of this terrible passion, or to help those close to him with his prayer, we offer prayers that will certainly help them in this good work. For prayer is the most effective and reliable weapon in the struggle against the evil powers, for “the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”
