As I was scrolling through #CatholicTwitter today I noticed a number of tweets about intrusive thoughts. It seemed that one person’s disclosure of struggling with intrusive thoughts prompted others to identify and come forward with theirs.
I take a position that, in general, American Catholic piety is by-and-large focused on exterior acts that promise rewards: novenas, rosaries, Sacraments, pro-life work. Novenas may be prayed for favors, rosaries for protection from evil, Sacraments to be in union with the Church, and pro-life work to manifest public commitment against the culture of death.
Intrusive thoughts, as understood by the psychiatric community, can be a sign of a mental illness such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This is a condition for which a good psychiatrist and therapist can be a great help.
However, in this article I am going to write about thoughts in a different way as they relate to actions that we call sins. In general, it seems that thoughts lead to actions, good actions and bad actions. Thoughts that lead to bad actions are thoughts that are actually destructive for us, for our relationships with others, and with God. It may be that some, using the label intrusive thoughts, are actually more frustrated from what might be more accurately called temptations. Temptations are thoughts that come from the Enemy (Word, Flesh, and Devil) and seek to win us over to destructive evil in our lives.
These kinds of thoughts lead us to do things like believe that it is a good idea to click on an image, once again, that could (and will) lead us down a path of lust-fueled sexual acting out. We may know well that these acts are: 1) Evil 2) Lead us away from God 3) Hurt those closest to us 4) Produce rotten fruit in our lives – including more shame, depression, self-loathing.
Yet, despite our resolve, despite our recent trip to Confession, despite the novenas and rosaries, despite our public commitment to Catholic ethics and morality, we find ourselves deceived once again into clicking onto an image that delivers us up to our Enemy.
Is the solution in more Sacraments, more rosaries, more novenas, more pro-life work, etc.? Haven’t we already tried that?? What is missing???
I believe that what is missing is an awareness of and emphasis upon the interior life, particularly our thought life and the influence of thoughts upon our experience of being, and ultimately our actions. What is missing is an experiential & spiritual psychology in the tradition of Christian metanoia focused on renewing of the mind. There is wisdom in this tradition that we can drink from so that the Word may also cleanse our minds and we do not constantly fall to the assault of afflictive thoughts.
In the Greek Christian tradition afflictive thoughts were called logismoi (λογίσμοι). The experience of these influences was categorized by Christian ascetics, notably Evagrius, who found that in general these thoughts, as temptations, fell into eight categories:
- gluttony
- fornication (lust)
- avarice (greed)
- sorrow (especially self-pity)
- discouragement
- anger
- vainglory
- and pride.
These thoughts precede actions that we call sins. The thoughts in themselves are not sins, i.e. their existence as thoughts, however they can quickly lead to sin, especially when our relationship with certain thoughts has become entrenched.
Think about how thoughts related to gluttony lead to overeating and lack of temperance. It may be a suggestion that we don’t need to care for ourselves this time, that we owe it to ourselves to indulge, that the flavor is a higher good than our health. All of these are lies yet we believe them.
What about thoughts of anger? Self-justified anger can lead us to violent and abusive behavior. We work ourselves up through our thinking, believing that abusive or violent actions are justified because of the nature of a wrong that took place (as we are seeing it). Thoughts like this can lead to murder when not purified.
Thoughts of pride tell us that we don’t need to repent (be converted) and that we don’t need to take self-sacrificial actions in union with the love of Christ. They urge us to delay our conversion, to rely on self. They also tell us that other people are the sinners, not us. They should repent, they should do this, they should do that. They deceive us this way until we are weak and fall because of our distance from God and self-reliance.
Thoughts of lust tell us that people are to be used as objects, for pleasure. This may be other people or even ourselves. They distort our view of the human person so that all we see is a fiction or distortion of reality based in selfish desire to use rather than to love. These sorts of thoughts have us constantly looking outside ourselves for completion, especially to the flesh, as if ultimately the flesh of another will save us. It is a lie, but a tempting one to believe.
When a person who has been afflicted long with thoughts of lust comes across a pornographic image, rather than view it with sorrow and prayer for the people involved and a prudence that would turn the eyes away from it, that person views the image as holding the promise that the thoughts were suggesting. There is often a wrong belief that we can go further down the road with these thoughts without them leading to destruction, as if we will remain to have some sort of control or mastery over the self as we click. But, we don’t, the further we go into it the more we find ourselves out of control, and under the control of a spirit, the spirit of fornication or lust. What started as something, in a sense, external to us: a thought or a temptation, becomes increasingly something we can’t differentiate ourselves from.
It is helpful to the disciple of Christ if he can become more aware of what is going on interiorly so that he can disengage from these thought-temptations earlier in their appearance. To do this it is helpful to better understand the stages whereby a person may move from temptation to enslavement from a particular spirit.
These stages are well outlined by Fr. Maximos in a book called The Mountain of Silence, on Eastern Orthodox spirituality. It should be noted that Fr. Maximos was a monk on Mount Athos at the time but was called to the episcopacy as Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol. As a Roman Catholic, I think that in spiritual theology in particular it is important that we follow Pope St. John Paul II’s suggestion to breathe with both lungs, that is the Western and Eastern Churches, and also that we repent & pray for deeper communion. There is great wisdom in Eastern Christianity, in particular for the penitent, the man called to reform his life and commit to a life of repentance and purity.
In The Mountain of Silence, Fr. Maximos describes five stages of logismoi as detailed in the teachings of the Fathers of the Church:
- Assault – the logismoi first attacks a person’s mind
- Interaction – a person opens up a dialogue with the logismoi
- Consent – a person consents to do what the logismoi urges him to do
- Defeat – a person becomes hostage to the logismoi and finds it more difficult to resist
- Passion or Obsession – the logismoi becomes an entrenched reality within the nous of a person
Sins begin with a thought. The origin of this thought can be described as The Enemy. The Enemy may be a fallen spirit, the World, or the concupiscent flesh, or any combination of these three. Referring to the World, the flesh and the Devil, as the Enemy comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is not necessary to get into deep analysis of the origins of these temptations except to recognize that they are tempting to us because we are 1) concupiscent and 2) unconverted to Christ. So, apart from the power of God we are in a weak position in respect to them.
By looking at the five stages of logismoi above it is clear that the initial assault is the stage where there is the most possibility for success. Success is viewed as not entertaining the thought, not letting it open into fantasy. When a thought is entertained it begins to open up into fantasy. At this point we begin to interact with the thought.
Somewhere in the process of interaction, if we don’t repent and redirect our focus to God, we begin to couple with the thought, which leads to consent of what the thought is suggesting. We click on the image, or make the search. Once we make the search, something happens.
We may not realize it but we have become hostage to it, it has defeated us.
Once it has defeated us it is highly likely that we will be lead into obsession where we find that we can’t let it go, we are on a spree and we don’t know when it will end. At this point we have no hope apart from the grace and power of God and the only way to freedom is to avail oneself to occasions of grace: repentance, prayer, Confession, addiction recovery support groups, and other things that can help us renew our mind and heart.
The point is that we can’t do it, we have allowed ourselves to become not only hostage to it but enmeshed with the spirit of lust. In the case of additions this has happened to such a degree that there is no quick and easy solution but to have faith in God’s power, instead of the self, to renew the mind and heart to the extent that we seek Him to do that over the course of one’s entire life.
In conclusion, thoughts that suggest sins, sometimes called intrusive thoughts represent an opportunity within our field of awareness for metanoia. We will be much less successful with conversion to Christ if we focus on the acting out of sin. Once we act out we are already hostage. We need to be more interior and not allow ourselves to entertain any thought of lust whatsoever.
To do this requires the commitment to grow in interior prayer through practices like lectio divina with the Scriptures, mental prayer, psalmody, and contemplation. It requires commitment to silence, stillness, and watchfulness. It is possible to be free of sin only if we first free ourselves with the presence of God from the thoughts that take us captive.
I used two sources for this article that I was grateful for. Although I had read The Mountain of Silence it has been quite some time since I read it. The sources I used were located: 1) https://annunciationoca.org/about-sin-death/the-struggle-against-the-thoughts-logismoi/ 2) https://orthodoxwiki.org/Logismoi . May all who contributed to this article be freed from every destructive thought by the power and life of Christ.
Note: Evagrius’s 8 thoughts were codified in Latin first by John Cassian then later came into the form we are most familiar with them as the Seven Deadly Sins through the writing of Pope Gregory the Great. Seeing them as sins is helpful because they lead to sin but I think we also need to be able to see them as thoughts, i.e. before they become sins, so that we may live more free of them.