Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite
Why the Mind Is Enslaved to Physical Pleasures
There are two reasons why the mind was enslaved to
physical pleasures. The first and main reason is the fact that after
the disobedience of Adam, his body received the whole of its existence
and constitution from physical pleasure that is impassionate and
irrational. Henceforth, man is sown with physical pleasure; he is
conceived with physical pleasure and he grows and matures in the womb
until the time of birth with physical pleasure. This is what the Prophet
David was referring to when he wrote: “For
behold, I was conceived in iniquities, and in sins did my mother bear
me.”
(Ps 50:5). The second reason, which follows the first, is the fact that
even after birth man is nurtured with physical pleasure. Throughout the
early years of childhood (and to a greater degree even during the nine
months of pregnancy), the power to reason is not developed and the mind
is unable to utilize the senses of the body in order to activate its own
energy and be preoccupied with its own rationality and spiritual
delight. Consequently, only the body utilizes these senses, and not
merely for its necessary nourishment, but also for its impassionate
pleasure. And to make things worse, the body even draws the mind itself,
being still imperfect and indiscreet, to the same physical pleasure,
thereby enslaving the mind to physical pleasure. The saintly Theodore
of Jerusalem spoke to this point in his most philosophical treatise:
Because the mind is
prepossessed by sense perception, we have the duality of desire and
anger. These are irrational tendencies and under the influence of nature
and not of reason, becoming a habit in the soul that penetrates all
the parts of our being and is difficult to uproot. Thus the order is
reversed. In other words, the physical senses are complete and strong
while the mind is not yet active. In fact the mind is observed to be
imperfect although it is actually powerful. Consequently, the mind can
be charmed to consider these physical things as good, in the very same
way that they are considered by the bodily senses. Thus the faculty of
reason, which is intended to rule, is made subservient to the senses and
we have the better being enslaved by the worse. This is why evil is
older than virtue.[i]
St. Gregory of Nyssa seems
to be in agreement with Theodore of Jerusalem: “The faculty of bodily
sense comes into active being simultaneously with the first birth,
while the mind must await until the appropriate age to start up. . . .
Because of this the senses rule over the mind even when it is somewhat
developed. . . . This is why it is so difficult for us to acquire the
understanding of what is truly good, for we first receive the experience
of the criteria of the physical senses and thus perceive good on the
basis of what is easy and pleasing.”[ii]
How bitter, tiresome, and
painful this early use of the senses becomes later for the unfortunate
mind! During the childhood period of about fifteen years, when the mind
is in a sort of stupor and led by the senses, the irrational and
instinctive senses receive their fill of physical pleasure, as they are
indulged without the restraints of reason. During this early stage the
mind is unable to activate its own powers through the bodily organs that
are not yet appropriately developed to receive it.
Moreover, the senses have already become accustomed
to the habit of physical pleasures by the time the faculty of reason has
matured. If the passions deprived of reasonable controls direct the
senses toward sin, who will then be able, tell me, to easily restrain
them?
For example, once the eyes
become accustomed to looking passionately upon the mature beauty of
living bodies; once the eardrums are accustomed to the pleasing sounds
of certain songs; once the sense of smell is delighted by the fragrances
of myrrh and aromatic things; once the tongue and the mouth taste or
rather become accustomed to the rich and tasty foods; and finally, once
the sense of touch is accustomed to fine and soft clothing -who will be
able after that, even if one is most eloquent and persuasive, to
convince people that what they have up to now enjoyed is not a true and
rational pleasure, but on the contrary an irrational and temporal one?
Who will put a muzzle on the senses that silently contradict, disagree,
and assert that the only pleasure that is to be recognized is the one
they have experienced and not any other that is immaterial and
spiritual? Will the mind do that? Unfortunately, while the mind knows
that such pleasures are appropriate to irrational animals and not to
itself, it cannot bring about this change. Remember that the mind too,
together with the senses, enjoyed during those early years the same
pleasures, and because of its simplicity and immaturity was attracted by
these pleasures and considered them to be good. Thus the mind appears
to be in a state of narcosis or rather bound by the five senses as by
five steel cables. In this condition the mind suffers and is troubled
because it sees that while it is really the ruler of the body, it has
become its slave. And yet, whether it wants to or not, the mind tends to
join the senses in enjoying physical pleasures. Who then will be able
to convince these physical senses to change this situation? Can the
constitution of our imagination and inner understanding do this? But
even this faculty of ours is painted over and filled with passionate
images and idols which have over the years been impressed upon it. Thus
it rather serves to excite through the memory both the mind and the
senses to enjoy the same pleasures. Who then can help? Can the heart
help? Unfortunately, even the heart is filled with desires and drives
that have been accumulated there over many years. This causes the
heart to force the mind, the imagination, and the senses and the entire
body to enjoy the same physical pleasures. Not only this, but the devil
himself, who rules over the carnal pleasures, in turn excites the mind
and the heart and the senses even more. The holy Fathers have said that
the devil, though bodiless, finds his pleasure in enjoying the bodily
pleasures of men. And, metaphorically speaking, these are but the dirt
and dust that he was condemned to eat through the serpent: “And dust
you shall eat all the days of your life” (Gen 3:14). St. Gregory the
Sinaite wrote on this point: “Humanly speaking, because the devils
lost their angelic joy and were deprived of divine pleasure, they have
acquired a sort of materialistic nature through their physical
passions and suffer to eat, as we do, the dust of the earth.”[iii]
How the Mind Is Freed from Physical Pleasure
After this period of childhood and the full development of reason, the
mind may learn on its own or may learn by hearing Holy Scripture and the
holy Fathers that its natural and appropriate pleasure is something
altogether different. What happens then? The mind, being by nature
rational and prudent and loving whatever is good, cannot suffer to see
the senses of its body so enslaved to their pleasurable objects. The
mind cannot continue to be a co-prisoner with the senses and a
contradiction: the king becoming a slave; the ruler becoming the ruled;
he who by nature is self-ruled and in authority becoming the obedient
subject. The mind, finally, cannot bear to receive such harm that will
gradually bring it to annihilation and to hell.
It is to this end then that
the mind undertakes its entire struggle. At first it seeks to show that
it was created by God to be the ruler and the king of the body. That is
to say, it seeks through the assistance of divine grace and all of its
courage, all of its will, and all of its knowledge to uproot out of
the senses of its body those long standing and entrenched habits which
they have acquired among physical things. And it does this in order to
free them from the bitter tyranny of the death-bearing pleasures they
have experienced. Moreover, the mind seeks to subdue with ease the
physical things to its own will. This struggle is truly a mighty one
because the mind comes to the knowledge of truth at a late point in
life. For if the soul had not been overcome by anyone, our task would
have been simply to keep it pure. But because it has now forged itself
into a strong link with passions and tendencies, we all know how very
difficult this struggle is to break this bond, to liberate the soul from
the worship of matter and to have it acquire the habit of virtue. And
how is this done? How indeed are the senses liberated from physical
passions and in turn placed under the obedience of the mind?
When a certain king plans to
subdue easily an enemy city that is fortified by strong walls, he cuts
off the food supplies to those people in the city and thus causes them
such hardship that they in time decide to surrender themselves. The mind
uses the same strategy in subduing the senses. Little by little the mind
deprives every sensory faculty of its customary bodily and pleasurable
passions. It no longer permits them to indulge themselves and thus
easily and in a short period of time brings them under its control. All
the time that this method is being utilized to control the passions, the
mind does not stand idle. Not at all. By receiving a certain ease and
freedom from bodily concerns, the mind turns to its own natural and
spiritual nourishment which is the reading of Sacred Scripture, the
acquirement of virtues, the doing of the commandments of the Lord, the
practice of prayer, the understanding of the purposes of the physical
and spiritual creations, and all the other spiritual and divine thoughts
and deeds which are to be found in the writings of the holy Fathers,
especially those who are called the neptic Fathers in the
anthologies of Philokalia and Evergetinos, and St. John
Climacus and St. Symeon the New Theologian and others.[iv]
As the Senses Attracted Originally the Mind to Physical Pleasures, the Mind Now Attempts to Bring the Senses Back to the Spiritual Pleasures
In addition to its own efforts to nourish itself
spiritually, the mind also attempts as much as possible to bring back
the senses toward the mind so that they too may enjoy with it spiritual
pleasures and thus become accustomed gradually to prefer them. This is
how it happened before with the mind when it became accustomed through
the senses to prefer physical pleasures. At first, generally speaking,
the body attempted through the senses and the physical pleasures to make
the mind and the spirit of man into flesh. On the contrary now, the mind
seeks purposely through the enjoyment of the immaterial and spiritual
realities to uplift the body also from its physical heaviness, and in a
sense to make it into spirit, as St. Maximos has witnessed in many of
his writings. Here is one example:
When desire is added to the
sense perception, it becomes a passion of pleasure procuring for itself
a specific image. When the sense is moved by desire it ag,ain makes the
perception it receives into a passion of pleasure. When the soul is
attracted against its very nature toward matter through the body, it
insinuates upon itself the earthly form. Knowing this, the saints seek
to move toward God through the natural tendency of the soul, while at
the same time they try appropriately to familiarize the body with God
through the practice of the virtues, hoping thus to beautify the body
with divine outward appearances.[v]
St. Gregory the
Theologian too spoke about this important point, saying that this is the
reason why the soul was joined to the body: to be for the body what God
is for the soul, that is, to instruct and guide the body and to bring it
home to God.
The soul was joined to the
body perhaps for other reasons which only God who joined them knows and
anyone who has through God understood these mysteries. As far as I am
able to know together with those who are with me, there are two reasons
why the soul was joined to the body. One reason is that by struggling
against the lower things, the soul may inherit the heavenly glory. . . .
The other reason is so that by drawing the lesser unto itself and to a
degree releasing it from its material thickness, the soul may draw the
body upward toward God. Thus, that which God is to the soul, the soul
becomes to the body, instructing and guiding through itself its fellow
servant, the material body, to become familiar with God.[vi]
There is an interaction and mutual influence of the
soul toward the body and vice versa the body toward the soul, according
to the metaphysicians. The attributes of each communicate with each
other because of the ineffable and natural bond which unites the soul
and the body, even though the exact reason for this union remains
essentially unknown to all philosophers and theologians.
The Fall of Adam. The Reason for the Lord’s Coming. The Ascetics
This then is the nature of that most renowned fall
of our forefather Adam. He rejected the spiritual nourishment and
pleasure and lowered himself to the pleasures of the bodily senses,
according to virtually the entire tradition of the holy Fathers. From
this original fall of Adam, we too have inherited that primordial drive
toward the material. This is why Theodore of Jerusalem wrote: “Adam,
by using the senses wrongly, marvelled at the physical beauty and
considered the fruit to be beautiful to the sight and good for eating.
By tasting of this fruit, he gave up the enjoyment of spiritual
things.”[vii] “When the woman saw
that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye,
and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She
also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Gen
3:6). According to St. Maximos, that tree of the knowledge of good and
evil is the passionate perception of the visible creation. “The tree
of the knowledge of good and evil is the visible creation, for
participation in it produces naturally both pleasure and suffering. . .
. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is
also the sense of the body, in which the activity of irrationality
clearly abides, and which man has experienced. Although man received the
divine commandment, he was in practice unable to keep it.”[viii]
This is also confirmed by Niketas Stethatos and others. St. John
Damascene especially wrote:
The tree of the knowledge of
good and evil can be understood as the visible and pleasurable food
which appears to be sweet but which in reality brings the partaker to a
union with evil. For God said, ‘You must not eat from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely
die.’ Naturally, physical food requires continual replenishment for
it is subject to corruption. He then who partakes of physical food finds it problematic to attain
incorruptibility.[ix]
For as soon as the senses know and experience the
good, that is, sensible pleasure, they also necessarily experience evil,
for the sister of pleasure is suffering. This is why in general all the
sensible pleasures are customarily called painful pleasures.[x]
In connection with this
subject St. John Chrysostom wrote: “What is easier than eating? And
yet I hear many saying that even eating is a wearisome toil.”[xi]
In agreement with the above St. Gregory of Nyssa also wrote:
“In the fruit of the forbidden tree there are two opposite elements
comingled. God said that those who partake of it will die, just as one
does who suffers the evil effects of poison that has been mixed with
honey. By the same token, as far as the pleasing of senses is concerned,
it seems good, but as far as the destruction of the partaker is
concerned, it is the ultimate evil.”[xii]
For this same reason, we have read in the history of the Romans that they
worshiped two deities -joy and sorrow- at one and the same time. Even
though they had dedicated to each a separate temple, they used to offer
sacrifice simultaneously to both. This way they indicated enigmatically
how very close joy and sorrow are united, just as pleasure and suffering
are. When one deity gives joy the other creates fear, and when one harms
and grieves us, the other gives us hope.
From this
point of view the reason for the coming of the New Adam, Jesus Christ,
can be said to be our liberation from seeking and loving only the
visible things, and at the same time our exaltation to love and enjoy
the spiritual realities, thus indicating our true transference to what
is indeed better. Those who wanted to achieve this very goal with ease,
that is, the cutting off of worldly pleasures and the enjoyment of the
spiritual ones, were the true philosophers and ascetics who abandoned
the inhabited places where there are always so many causes for sinful
attacks and went to live in deserts and caves. Not finding there the
usual causes of worldly pleasures, they were more readily able to subdue
the senses and in relatively short periods of time were able to rise up
to the sweetest enjoyment of the spiritual and divine realities.
The Natural and Unnatural Pleasure of the Mind
I beseech you to do this, this very same thing. You
have come to know precisely on your own, being prudent, and through Holy
Scripture, being a lover of learning, that the natural pleasure of the
mind is to always be preoccupied with and nourished by the beauty of
spiritual realities. St. Maximos wrote: “Intelligible things are food
for the mind.” You have also come to know that the tendency of the
mind toward the pleasures of sensible things is contrary to the nature
of the mind; it is a tendency that is forced, passionate, corruptive,
and entirely foreign to the mind. St. Isaac wrote that “when the
mind is attracted by the physical things, it partakes of the nourishment
of the beasts and becomes, so to speak, beastly.” According to St.
Kallistos, only the spiritual pleasure can be properly called pleasure
and be primarily pleasure because during the course of enjoying it and
after the enjoyment, it still brings us joy. On the contrary the
sensible pleasure according to the flesh cannot be properly called nor
in fact be a pleasure. Physical pleasure uses the name of pleasure
falsely, for in the enjoyment of it and afterwards it brings sorrow to
the heart. Again, St. Kallistos wrote:
This is what should properly
be called pleasure, namely that which by nature and reason cannot be
condemned and which lasts and is ever more active, bringing joy and
gladness to the heart even after it is fulfilled. Anyone therefore who
would desire, let him seek the pure pleasure that is not mixed with
sorrow, the intelligible and spiritual pleasure. For this is indeed
the true and main pleasure of the heart. . . . Carnal pleasure that is
not of the mind and the spirit is even wrongly called a pleasure, for it
is induced and as soon as it is done it creates a bitter regret. It is
clearly a lie to call it a pleasure, for it
is a spurious and counterfeit pleasure.[xiii]
St. John Chrysostom wrote:
“The pleasures are harsh executioners of the body, in fact they are
worse than that, for they strain and force the body with bonds not made
by hand.”[xiv]
It seems to me too that pleasure is like a rough file smeared with oil,
which when the cat licks it up, it also licks with it the blood of its
own tongue. Or it is like a fly in the honey that tastes a certain
sweetness but is at the same time entrapped in the honey and dies.
Pleasure is also a bait that is superficially sweet, but when
swallowed brings about a painful death. This is why the wise Solomon
wrote: “The lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is
smoother than oil, but in the end she is bitter as gall” (Prov 5: 3).
For a long period of time
now your senses have become accustomed to charge after physical
pleasure. They have been drawing with them your mind, not permitting it
to be nourished by thoughts that are natural, proper, and related to
it. You have not been able to enjoy the appropriate spiritual growth in
life and pleasure. What must you do? I have reminded you by what I have
so far written that it is necessary to seek as much as possible to
govern with great prudence your five senses. To those which are
essential, that is those which sustain the body, give them what they
need. Those which are not essential but only create pleasure must be cut
off. In this will you prove yourself to be lord of your passions: when
you will be able through your entire courage to liberate your senses
from the corruptive, painful, and false pleasures, and when at the same
time you will liberate your hegemonious mind from their distracting
attempts, leaving it thus free to return to the desirable beauty of
intelligible things which are really and truly good.
According to St. Basil the
Great, it is truly inappropriate for man to allow the senses to be
filled with sensible things and at the same time to block the mind from
its own proper activity among the intelligible things. He wrote: “I
consider it inappropriate to allow the senses unhindered to be filled
with their own matter, while the mind alone is shut out of its own
proper activity. For as the sense is to physical things so is the mind to intelligible things.”[xv]
Our senses then have in a way become hooked to the physical
pleasures, not only during the early years of our youthful life, as we
have indicated thus far, but also during the later years. Our own mind
and that of the entire human race has also been hooked upon the bait of
the same physical pleasures. Consequently, we have been shamefully
deprived and have all lost that blessed and true pleasure of ours. By
the same token, if these senses of ours are not freed from the physical
pleasures, the mind itself will not be able to be freed from them and to
return to its natural pleasure. It is impossible for this to happen in
any other way. It is indeed impossible.
St.
Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain - A Handbook of Spiritual Council –
Chapter 2; Concerning the Mind pp. 76-85 (“The Classics of Western
Spirituality” series.)
