We are simultaneously in a time that celebrates passion, but is pushing technology on us that reduces genuine passion. Whatever your deeply held feelings are, as long as you harm no person but yourself, then you will be celebrated, if you can also claim happiness. What about the spiritual happiness of Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Bible, and the Fathers and Mothers of the Church?
Forget it. There will never be silence enough to reflect or empty time enough to think. Real happiness, human flourishing, what contemporary Christians often call “joy” is not to be found in a man looking at his phone five hours a day. Our senses are stimulated constantly and Wisdom, the kind that birthed monotheism, science, and great literature is impossible without learning to say “no” to our senses.
Human intellect, reason and Divine wisdom, must be in control, but this is hard when we are bounded with advertisements designed to teach us to say “yes” to our senses and “no” to our minds. The result will be idol worship, because the worship of idols is sensual by nature. The Christian philosopher, theologian, and sage Maximos said:
- When the senses have the intellect in their clutches, they propagate polytheism through each individual sense organ; because in their slavery to the passions they pay divine honors to the sensible objects corresponding to each organ.*
Modern idols are sometimes called gods, but most often we worship sports, food, pornography or “beauty,” and any number of other false daemons. They enflame our passions, but meaninglessly. We watch sports, but do not sweat. We consume mountains of food, but enjoy it less. Our sexual desires are sated to the point of boredom, but we are having fewer children. Some of us become effete, loving beautiful things and forgetting Beauty Herself. We can even love education, piling up credentials, to sate the passion for intellectual honors without learning.
What is the solution?
Recollect that passions uneducated, untrained are contrary to reason. Saying “no” to desire is harder than thinking well . . .and thinking well is hard enough. All of us can be manipulated by fear, love, and comfort yet education should teach us to say “no.” Sadly, a consumerist education can never take this as an objective, because it is hard, or boring, or unattractive. Oddly, the happiest people will be those who let the Divine intellect rule through the renewed mind.
The solution is so simple, we resist it: Read your Bible. Pray daily. Confess your sins one to another. Fast from different types of pleasure. Find a spiritual father and mother and learn discipline. Create rather than consume. Serve the poor.
There are no laws against these things and they are medicine bitter at the first, but bringing health to soul and body. I am certainly not there. I eat too much, enjoy ease too often, and am too undisciplined in mental life, but God help me, I want to learn. I want to worship only God and enjoy sensible objects in their places. They are not gods: God is one.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on my a sinner.
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* With thanks to the person who sends me a Blessed Maximos quote daily. Taken from Philokalia, Volume 2.
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