The Desert Saints, Doomscrolling and Dopamine

After a spiritual experience, a young woman exchanges her hedonistic lifestyle and retreats to the desert with only three loaves of bread and the clothes she is wearing. She lives there alone as her clothes turn to dust and her food becomes desert weeds.

A man close to 50 leaves his life of solitude in the desert to help the poor. Fearful of acknowledgement for his deeds, he feigns madness – extinguishing candles in church, throwing nuts at worshippers, howling at the moon, and dragging dead dogs through town.

A man in his 30s sets up a new life on a clifftop, where he carves three rooms out of the rock. He then walls up the entrances with only a tiny window to which visitors would bring food and water. He lives there until he dies in his 90s.

A 13 year old reads the Beatitudes and shortly after enters a community of monks. He is expelled for his extreme devotion. Soon crowds flock to him seeking counsel and prayer. To escape, he finds a pillar from an abandoned ruin, climbs it and lives his life on that pillar for more than 30 years.

These of course are descriptions of some of the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (St Mary of Egypt, St Symeon the Holy Fool, St John of Lycopolis and St Symeon the Stylite). As a contemporary Christian, it is easy to dismiss these figures as, well clinically insane. But I’m reluctant to do this. History is full of oddities and absurdities. And maybe rather than criticising the people we find in these stories, we should allow them to criticise us.

It cannot be overstated that the birth and development of ancient Christian asceticism changed the landscape of the ancient world in profound ways.According to some estimates from the records, the number of monks and nuns in Egypt outnumbered the local populations. This was a profoundly popular movement. Those who had stories written about them were those who were able to deny the flesh in remarkable ways, and conform their lives to the holiness of God.

We could of course, engage the Protestant voice within our Anglican personality and simply call this whole movement wrong – a denial of grace and an adoption of a works salvation. A gnostic dualism, foreign to the New Testament. That would certainly give us permission to ignore what has been a distinctive, widespread and enduring practice of the Church for most of her history. So, can we find truth and goodness in their aims and practice?

This has been a question I’ve been trying to find an answer to since my undergraduate in Ancient History. I read the stories of these saints then and found them disturbing. Confusing. Disrupting. But I couldn’t ignore them. And unfortunately, decades later I’m still reading those accounts. While their strangeness grips me, I do not find them comforting. And while, the saints lives are written that we might emulate them I’m yet to find one I really want to emulate.

The Flesh

So where did these saints even get their justification to do this? Aren’t they denying the goodness of creation? The more I read, the more I see a common theme. The Desert Saints were trying to gain mastery over ‘the flesh’.

Paul writes:

Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. (Galatians 5:16-17, NRSV)

Unfortunately, several contemporary translations opt for something like ‘sinful nature’ for ‘flesh’, which too greatly narrows the interpretation. The word quite literally means ‘flesh’ – the meat on our bones. This sound uncomfortable dualistic to us. David Bentley Hart argues that the meaning implies a very strong provisional dualism throughout the New Testament, for ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God’ (see Hart, The New Testament, pg 555-556). But I think Hart is a little strong. Flesh is involved in the resurrected order. The risen Lord says, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39, RSV)

Similarly, the church father Ignatius of Antioch writes:

For myself, I know and believe that He was in the flesh even after the Resurrection. And when He came to Peter and Peter’s companions, He said to them: “Here; feel me and see that I am not a bodiless ghost.” Immediately they touched Him and, through this contact with His Flesh and Spirit, believed. For the same reason they despised death and, in fact, proved stronger than death. Again, after the Resurrection, He ate and drank with them like a being of flesh and blood, though spiritually one with the Father. (Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, 3)

Dopamine Addiction

I’m not convinced that ‘flesh’ is equivalent to ‘the body’, as Hart gets close to saying. While the term isn’t wholly metaphorical, its meaning must go beyond the purely literal. In our time, one way of seeing what the flesh is could be something close to how we understand our response to dopamine. Dopamine is the feel-good hormone; the reward drug, activated by anything we enjoy. The problem is that in today’s world, we are surrounded by an ever-abundant supply of dopamine triggers, such that our vision of the good life has become something close to ‘activating as much dopamine as possible’.

I regularly ask my classes what their personal vision of the good life is. ‘Happiness’, they say. ‘Having fun’. ‘Being rich’. ‘Having friends’. ‘Being successful’.

Dr Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Addiction, is introduced in the following way:

We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.

What’s fascinating is comparing this to Paul’s own list of the works of the flesh:

Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-21 NRSV)

Yes, anger, fighting and conflict are powerful dopamine triggers. The list is pretty close to a comprehensive list of common ancient behaviours that trigger a dopamine response. It is ‘fleshly’ – it responds only to the chemical need and refuses to allow any higher order to restrict this.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another. (Galatians 5:22-26 NRSV)

Instead, the Spirit exercises ‘self-control’ and behaviours that are determined not by our bodily impulses but by the Spirit within us.

Saints for Today

As we return to the seemingly insane saints of the desert era, what begins to emerge are a group of people who were convinced that there was a higher good in human life than our impulses. They were so convinced of this that they decided to close themselves off (quite literally) to the possibility of responding to those impulses and instead seek the ways of the Spirit, the life of God. They believed that the impulses (read here dopamine) distracted us from the ultimate good in life (God himself), in favour of lesser things. In all the stories of the desert saints, they indeed find this good and experience our souls’ true desire – union with God himself.

It is no secret today that our young people are both highly disturbed by and worried about their own use of smartphones, and at the same time unable to disconnect from them. Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation has had a powerful impact in opening our eyes to see the destructive impact that smartphones have had on our society. And as much as I 100% agree with him, my own children return home from school to their parents on our phones, doomscrolling (a powerful dopamine stimulus). Once that’s done, we check emails (again), or Insta, because well…. we have no good reason, we are just responding to our need for a hit of dopamine. But as Lemke indicates above, it’s not just phones. It’s food, chocolate, alcohol – the reward stimuli are everywhere to be seen. And children and young people watch every adult in their lives, behave as if the good is found in dopamine release.

We all need new role models. We need the stories of the saints. Saints who were indeed saints because they were able to break free of what has become so addictive for us. Saints whose lives were disturbing and disrupting and shocking but who force us to question the quality of our own lives. Maybe we too, could seek something higher. Maybe we too, could find the joy of holiness.

I’m not at all suggesting that the extreme asceticism of the desert saints is something to emulate literally. And I don’t believe the Lives were ever written for that reason. Instead, their extreme examples remind us of a different vision, one that we can offer ourselves and those we minister to. For Dr Anna Lembke speaks further about the problem with addictions in general. It becomes more and more difficult to experience pleasure at all, without a greater and greater stimulus. In other words, dopamine addiction in the end makes happiness impossible. The flesh leads us via lies to darkness.

Instead, we can offer a truly relevant and satisfying vision of human life – one that follows the promptings of the Spirit toward the life of God who gave up his fleshly life, to resurrect our bodies and unite us with him forever. This is a vision of true life. A vision of true happiness and joy. A vision that includes the body but is not enslaved to it. Indeed, we have ‘crucified the flesh’ and instead look for the resurrection life.

Our Good News offers a new way and a new vision – one that sees the good in relational connection (love for God and our neighbours) and sees humanity as having true freedom – redemption from all the things that enslave us and union with God in his infinite and all-encompassing love.