On Smoking Tobacco
Man has distorted even the pleasures of the flesh… For 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 who lives in the body; with this smoke he fills the air of his dwelling and outside it too, and first of all he himself is steeped in this foul smell — and so the constant coarsening of his own senses and of his heart, which is continually swallowing smoke, cannot fail to act on the delicacy of the feelings of the heart; it gives them a fleshly, coarse and sensual character.
Tobacco weakens the soul, multiplies and strengthens the passions, darkens the mind and destroys health by a slow death. Irritability and gloom are the result of the soul’s sickly state from smoking tobacco.
When a person smokes, his soul is already a captive of demonic powers. Know that not long before the (universal) flood people carried small jugs full of water about with them: they offered this water to one another. They did not even know that they would perish by water. And today everyone carries matches or a lighter in his pocket, that is, fire. The first world was destroyed by water for its lawlessness, and the present one is preparing to be destroyed by fire; that is why many smoke, and we shall burn and turn to ashes.
What strikes the eye is how low and pitiful the motives of beginning smokers are — the wish to do as everyone does, the fear of ridicule, the wish to look bigger in others’ eyes. It is at once the psychology of a coward and of a sly one. Estrangement from family and friends follows. From the aesthetic point of view it is unseemly, and especially unbearable in girls. And from the psychological point of view smoking tobacco opens the door to everything forbidden and vicious. Smoking and every kind of narcotic stifle in us the sense of holiness and purity. The first cigarette is the first fall, the loss of innocence. It is not a false puritanism but a direct feeling and a 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.
