The Tragedy of Addiction

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

8. The Tragedy of Addiction
Goethe: “Master, I am in great distress! The spirits that I conjured up I cannot now get rid of.”

The Wide World of Addiction
There is undoubtedly a spiritual dimension to addiction that all recovering addicts readily admit.
What drives addiction is longing—a longing not just of the brain, belly or loins, but of the heart.
Addictions eventually center in distress and in the self-defeating choice of an agent to relive the distress. In fact, trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it is typically the mechanism that closes the trap on an addict. Then every time you meet a demand, it escalates and any good is sapped away by this parasite.

The Deadly Spiral
What converts a delinquent to an addict is when he tries to relieve the despair by indulging his obsession all over again, thereby initiating a new round of addiction.
The same culture that that encourages self-indulgences also punishes the indulgent with scorn fit for a failed god.
Addictions flourish by feeding on human attempts to master them.
An addict stands a chance of recovery only if he is finally willing to tell himself the truth. He must admit that he is helpless.

Sin or Symptom?
Not all addictions are sin.
Perhaps the addict is responsible for his addiction since he made choices before he became addicted that ultimately led to his addiction. We are also responsible for our addictions once we get them in that we must choose to seek help.
Perhaps a better category to use would be “tragedy” since it implies the fall of someone who is responsible and significant, someone who is naturally great but whose greatness has been compromised and finally crushed by a mix of forces, including personal agency, that work together for evil in a way that seems simultaneously surprising and predictable, preventable and inevitable.
Addicts are sinners like everyone else but also tragic figures whose fall is often owed to a combination of factors so numerous, complex and elusive that we cannot fully understand them.

Overlapping Circles

Dynamics of Addiction
Addiction is about our hungers and thirsts, about our ultimate concern, about the clinging and longing of our hearts, and about giving ourselves over to these things.
When it is in full cry, addiction is finally about idolatry, where the addict will do anything for his idol, including dying for it.
The addict needs to turn to God because the “hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and hIs compulsion is our liberation.”