Thorn of Addiction: St. Paul and the Struggle of Sin

How the Grace of God saved me from self-abuse

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Apostle Paul

I recently wrote about my sudden religious conversion experience here and here wherein a few weeks ago, I heard my conscience, the authentic Voice of God as written on my heart, convict me deep in my bones, jolting me out of a ritualistic sissy kink masturbation session fueled by my 20-year-long cannabis and porn addiction driven by an underlying paraphilia called autogynephilia and an ethical worldview that philosophically prioritized the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure above all.

As someone who has been addicted to cannabis, porn, and extreme fetishistic masturbation for my entire life, I know first-hand what St. Paul means when he says in Romans 7:

“¹⁵ I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. ¹⁶ But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷ So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.”

St. Paul’s description here is familiar to all people with an addiction.

Many people don’t think cannabis has any risk of addiction because the physical withdrawal symptoms are not as dangerous as, say, heroin or alcohol addiction.

However, Dr. Anna Lempke explains in her book Dopamine Nation the same dopamine circuitry that drives addiction and habit formation for every other substance or addiction (sex, porn, gambling, shopping, hard drugs, etc.) works the same in cannabis addiction.

I cannot tell you how many times I tried to quit cannabis. When I got high, I would feel disgusted with myself and vow to quit and throw my vape pen in the trash. But then, a few hours later, when I sobered up, I would be overcome with temptation and dig it out of the garbage like a desperate junkie.

My inner voice of addiction would come up with a million rationalizations for why it’d be “no big deal” if I got high one more time because “I can quit next week” or “this is the last time,” only for the cycle to start over again. I was stuck in this loop of craving, indulgence, guilt, vowing to quit, craving, indulgence, over and over and over.

I have an app that tracks how long you’ve been sober. Well, I must have had hundreds of “Day 1s.” It was pathetic how much this addiction had a hold over me.

Addiction as the Heart of Sin

It has struck me, however, that addiction could be thought to be at the heart of every sin. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that addiction, or negative habit formation, is the defining characteristic of the phenomenology of sin and definitive of the human condition.

In his famous Principles of Psychology, the great American philosopher and psychologist William James said, “When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.”

We are habit-forming creatures and oriented towards short-term hedonistic pleasure satisfaction. It is hard to sacrifice the temptation of short-term pleasure for the more subtle reward of doing what’s best in the long term.

The flesh body has a natural tendency to get stuck in habit loops. And it is much easier to form bad habits than good habits, simply because there are a hundred bad habits for every good habit.

That is, there are many more ways to act in a harmful way than to act in a way that is not harmful. Harmful to who? To Self and our bodies, which ought to be “the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God.” (1 Corinthians 6:19)

I believe this is why Christ gave us the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist. It must be a regular ritual to cleanse our souls, for we regularly fail to resist temptations, and often we engage in negative habit-forming behavior. Most of our lives are defined by the behaviors that constitute our many bad habits.

While I am not yet confirmed Catholic and cannot partake in the Eucharist, since my recent conversion experience, I’ve been attending daily Mass, and I cannot tell you how much I yearn to receive the Body of Christ so that I may attain communion with God. As St Francis of Assisi said,

“O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble himself like this and hide under the form of a little bread, for our salvation.”

The Catechism describes the Eucharist as “food for the soul,”

"What material food produces in our bodily life, Holy Communion wonderfully achieves in our spiritual life. Communion with the Body of Christ increases the communicant’s union with the Lord, forgives his venial sins, and preserves him from grave sins. Since receiving this sacrament strengthens the bonds of charity between the communicant and Christ, it also reinforces the unity of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ." (CCC 1392)

I believe Jesus, in his infinite wisdom, gave us this institution as a weekly ritual precisely because humans are habit-forming creatures. We need to replace our addictive habits with habits that are actually true nourishments. Christ wants us to become addicted to Him so that we may be saved from the sin of our bad habits.

St. Paul and the Phenomenology of Sin

Let’s dive deeper into the phenomenology of sin as addiction:

Struggling with Sin

¹⁴ So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. ¹⁵ I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. ¹⁶ But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷ So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

¹⁸ And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[d] I want to do what is right, but I can’t. ¹⁹ I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. ²⁰ But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹ I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. ²² I love God’s law with all my heart. ²³ But there is another power^[e] within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. ²⁴ Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? ²⁵ Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin. (Romans 7:14-21)

Is there any human whose life is made up primarily of behaviors of good habits? Most of our daily life seems constituted by our many bad habits, rather than our good habits.

This is part and parcel of what it means to be human. But we are also made in the image of God, and we have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with the Moral Law written on our heart, such that we have an awareness of the ideal from which we derive our definitions of “bad habits” and “good habits.”

We all know the difference between a good habit and a bad habit. A smoker deep down knows it’s a bad habit and that he ought to give up the habit. A glutton deep down knows that it’s a bad habit to gorge themselves on food they know to be bad for their health. A porn addict knows deep down knows it’s a destructive habit. A masturbation addict knows deep down that feelings of shame and guilt after orgasm derive from his moral conscience. A drug addict knows they need to kick the habit.

That is the nature of bad habits: rarely do we engage in them without a subtle conscious awareness that we really ought to work on kicking the habit. And yet we can go for years, decades, our entire lives, living in this struggle where we know we ought to kick our bad habits, we know they are destroying our lives, and occasionally attempt to kick the habits, but find ourselves returning to them over and over, engaged in a perpetual internal struggle. St. James says,

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. (James 4:17 )

This is precisely the nature of addiction. The drug addict knows he ought not to be doing the drug but fails not to do what he knows he ought not be doing. St. Paul describes this inner conflict perfectly:

¹⁸ And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[d] I want to do what is right, but I can’t. ¹⁹ I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. ²⁰ But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:18-20)

This “inner conflict” is precisely the nature of addiction and captures perfectly the phenomenology of sin.

Paul acknowledges he is “of the flesh,” a slave to sin living in a “body of death.” This “body of death” makes it such that he does not understand why he does the things he does. He does not do what he wants (the good habit) but does the very thing he hates (the bad habit.

I relate to this with cannabis. I want to live a sober life. And I do not understand why I always come back around and do the thing I hate: getting high.

Paul says it is not him who does the bad habit but the sin that dwells in him. Elsewhere, he talks about his “thorn in the flesh,” which I believe can also be thought of as analogous to our enslavement to the habits of flesh.

When we have a bad habit, it sometimes does not feel like “us” who gives in to it. It is like we are on autopilot. This is why I think Paul’s metaphor about being “enslaved” to sin is so apt. “Running on autopilot” gets at the same thing the metaphor of enslavement does.

It means we cannot help it. Yet we have a conscious awareness that observes our bodies running on autopilot. So, there is a split consciousness. The conscious self witnesses the body running on autopilot but cannot interfere because the sinful body is enslaved by the power of sin, bound by chains of habit that cannot be broken.

The Healing Power of the Body of Christ

Is there anything that can break these chains of habit that keep us enslaved to sinful behavior? Yes! Christ’s blood! Only Christ has the power to conquer the body of death and help us “die” to sin and be reborn to holiness.

Paul says we have an inner desire to cement our good habits but cannot do so. Without Christ, we are enslaved to our bad habits.

This is, I think, why Alcoholics Anonymous has always emphasized the necessity of acknowledging a Higher Power when breaking the habit of alcohol: without a transcendent source of power greater than the limitations of our intellect and will, there is no way to break the bondage of the body.

Have people broken bad habits without explicitly thinking about Christ? Sure, I don’t think having Christ in mind is strictly necessary to tap into that transcendental power. You might even reject the concept and say there is no such thing as the transcendent and successfully break a habit. But I do not think it’s possible to break out of addiction if you are only operating at the level of weighing up competing desires and relying on the strength of your own will.

Pleasure Activism and the Limits of Liberalism

St. John says,

16 For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world. (1 John 2:16)

Temptations and cravings for physical pleasure define the Fallen world. Hedonism is at the heart of the modern secular West. Our worldwide economy is driven by consumerism, hedonism, pleasure-seeking, novelty-seeking, and sensation-seeking.

And secular ethics says this is good! A good example of this was the recent book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown, which argues that hedonistic pleasure for its own sake is a radical act of resistance and healing in the face of oppression. Indeed, she writes,

“My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life.”

This is the modern ethos of our time. “If it feels good, it must be good.” This is the entire logic of our modern secular sexual ethics. For example, abuse and self-abuse gets justified quite easily with the following reasoning: Sadomasochism “feels” good, and I freely choose it, so it, therefore, must be valuable and good.

Because the secular liberalism of the naturalistic worldview has no conception that God might have created our bodies for a particular higher-order purpose according to Natural Law, bodies become, as the great postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze describes it, merely “desiring-machines” and assemblages of multiplicities:

“Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.” (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)

The naturalistic worldview has no conception that there is a proper and holy way for our desires to be ordered, that some pursuits of pleasure are out of step with the normative ideal baked into God’s Eternal Law.

Such a concept was once anathema to me as a hardcore atheist and is a primary stumbling block for modern educated Westerners to accept the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexual ethics, which itself is probably the number one issue keeping people out of the Church despite feeling an inward pull towards the grandeur, beauty, and truth of Catholicism.

The ethics of liberal Pleasure Activism and its idolatry of bodily pleasure have things backward. As St. Paul says, we ought to “Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth.” (Colossians 3:2).

It is not that bodies are bad and the spiritual is good as the gnostics want to have it. Bodily pleasure is indeed a good thing and something God gave us to enjoy. But it must be properly oriented in accordance with God’s Eternal Law so that our desires work towards the fulfillment of their proper end as designed in God’s perfect Blueprint for humanity.

But praise the Lord that God the Father, in His infinite Wisdom, imprinted the Moral Law into my heart so that a few weeks ago, he convicted me of the sins of my addiction to cannabis and pornographic masturbatory self-abuse. Stopped me dead in my tracks. As the Catechism says,

"Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment" (CCC 1776)

As I go deeper into the Lenten season, I hope to continue the daily spiritual disciplines of attending daily Mass and praying the Rosary so that I might prepare for confirmation this Easter and then finally receive the Body of Christ for the sake of my salvation. As St. Ignatius of Loyola said,

“One of the most admirable effects of Holy Communion is to preserve the soul from sin, and to help those who fall through weakness to rise again. It is much more profitable, then, to approach this divine Sacrament with love, respect, and confidence, than to remain away through an excess of fear and scrupulosity.”