Read Part 1 of this series on addiction and Saint Benedict’s Twelve Steps of Humility.
We turn to what I believe to be the most important and common denominator present at the origin, escalation, and outright enslavement of any addiction, and that which certainly serves as the fundamental barrier to seeking recovery and attaining freedom—the sin of pride. As Saint Augustine wrote, “There never can have been, and never can be, and there never shall be any sin without pride” (City of God).
Given that the birth and progression of unnatural attachments always involve a certain moral aspect of sin, even if mitigated by ignorance, habit, or diminished freedom of the will, it necessarily follows that pride is always at play in the maddening conundrum we call addiction. “We want to be the masters of our own destiny. We keep trying to substitute our own will for God’s will, but our pride always brings us to a fall and thrusts us even further away from an Eden we had hoped to recapture on our own terms” (Addiction & Grace).
And to be sure, pride wears many masks. “Denial” is a persistent face of pride that deludes the addict into thinking there is no obsession or compulsion whatsoever. “Bargaining” is that mask of pride that deceives the addict into believing the obsession can be managed and controlled. “Fear and distrust” are often an under-recognized face of pride that scare the addict into clinging to the obsession for its perceived safety and protection. “Vanity” and its cousin “vainglory,” what we most commonly associate with pride, seduce the addict into believing the obsession is necessary in order to be loved and accepted. And “self-pity,” often masquerading as humility, is in my experience the most pernicious form of pride because it confuses the addict into rationalizing the obsession as a justifiable, reasonable, and even deserved reward. It indeed can be the hardest shackle of pride to unfetter.
What so often “compels” a person to act out in their pride is a deep aversion to suffering, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual in nature. This is why addiction impacts our whole being. It represents an unwillingness to accept “hardship as the pathway to peace,” as we recite in the Serenity Prayer, a refusal to embrace pain and “offer it up” in trusting union with Christ, a failure to understand that suffering from a Christian perspective is redemptive and therefore in some mysterious way purposeful and even necessary. As C.S. Lewis remarked, “If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable” (The Problem of Pain).
In addiction, we violently separate suffering from love, like some terrible form of spiritual nuclear fission, the result of which is a radical distortion of love and a selfish transformation that, like an atom bomb, causes widespread destruction to the addict and everyone in the addict’s vicinity. We self-medicated in one way or another to dissociate from reality when suffering demanded our attention. We obstinately doubled down again and again in our narcissistic thinking, insanely doing the same harmful things over and over hoping the specter of suffering would go away. To our horror, we discovered that our futile attempts to flee suffering in our compulsions only paradoxically compounded our misery all the more, yet our unyielding pride kept us rolling like a runaway freight train on the same destructive and deadly course. We kept futilely groping for the “Promised Land” of pain-free bliss only to find ourselves wandering endlessly in a hopeless dystopia of our own creation. We fantastically believed that our addictions were the road to “Eden” when in fact they were the highway to hell.
Another way to consider pride is to recognize how it has been the driving force behind humanity’s ruinous embrace of one of the oldest, gravest, and most degrading sins of all, the sin of idolatry. Idolatry in its many forms has beguiled humankind since the Fall itself. Our present culture’s worship of the ego at the altar of the Self, with its resultant epidemic of addictions of every imaginable kind, is just the modern variation of the same old, age-old heresy of idolatry. Again, to quote Dr. Gerald G. May, “Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as a source and object of our deepest true desire” (Addiction & Grace).
Human beings have been wantonly substituting the Creator with the created for millennia, seeking foolishly, as Saint Thomas Aquinas noted, to replace God with either wealth, pleasure, power, or honor (Summa Theologiae). We are no different than the ancient Israelites who hoarded manna in the wilderness (cf. Exodus 16:27-29) and worshiped a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai (cf. Exodus 32:1-9). We, like them, recklessly sought infinite and everlasting fulfillment—that which only God can provide—in the finite and the transient, leaving us evermore hollow and empty the more we consumed, tyrannized by a runaway craving that could never be satisfied. Our insatiable pride deceived and abused us, no doubt with a little help from the Devil along the way, and we in turn deceived and abused others with our addictions to prop up the towering, tottering edifice of our pride.
Socrates wisely proclaimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living” in Apology of Socrates, and spiritually speaking, when left unexamined, unconfessed, and unreconciled, the sin of pride is spiritually fatal. As Scripture asserts, “The affliction of the proud has no healing, for a plant of wickedness has taken root in him” (Sirach 3:28). And again, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Pride not only separates us from God, but as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, it “sets oneself in competition with God” (Glossary). Saint John Cassian even went so far as to say, “How great is the evil of pride, that it rightly has no angel, nor other virtues opposed to it, but God Himself as its adversary” (Institutes).
Indeed, Our Lord revealed to Saint Faustina, “The proud remain always in poverty and misery, because My grace turns away from them to humble souls” (Diary). All of this is to say that the only way out of the spiritual death spiral of pride and the black hole of addiction is the virtue of humility, for it is only with humility of heart that one can truly receive the love, mercy, light, life, and healing that comes from the grace of God. Indeed, our God promised through the prophet Isaiah, “I dwell in a high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Isaiah 57:15b).
This series will continue with Part 3.
Pete S. is a grateful Catholic in recovery. He lives in Augusta, GA and helped start a CIR General Recovery meeting at St. Teresa of Avila Parish in Grovetown. He actively sponsors several individuals in CIR. He is also a regular content contributor for the CIR Daily Reflections. And as a result of his recovery journey in CIR, he discerned a calling to the Benedictine spiritual way of life and on September 30, 2023, was invested as an Oblate novice of the Order of Saint Benedict affiliated with St. Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, PA.