How Appetites Obscure the Soul

Dec 05, 2025

How Appetites Obscure the Soul – Testimonies and Comparisons from Holy Scripture in Support of This Doctrine

The soul is blinded and plunged into darkness as a result of a third harm inflicted by its passions. Just as vapors obscure the air and block the sun’s rays, or a tarnished mirror cannot clearly reflect the image presented to it; just as water stirred by mud cannot distinctly reproduce the features of the face that looks into it: so too the soul, whose understanding is captivated by passions, becomes obscured and does not allow the sun of natural reason, nor the supernatural sun, which is divine Wisdom, the freedom to penetrate and illuminate it with its splendor. The royal Prophet says in this sense: My iniquities have encompassed me, and I am unable to see.

When the understanding is buried in darkness, the will languishes, and the memory becomes sluggish. Now, since all faculties depend in their operations on this primary faculty, once it is blinded, the others necessarily fall into confusion and disorder. David adds: My soul is greatly troubled. In other words: its faculties are disordered.

In this state, the understanding, as we said, is no longer able to receive the illumination of divine Wisdom, just as air laden with dark vapors is incapable of receiving sunlight. The will is powerless to embrace God with pure love, just as a tarnished mirror cannot clearly reflect the image offered to it. Finally, memory, obscured by the darkness of disordered appetite, cannot calmly penetrate the remembrance of God, just as muddy water cannot clearly reproduce the face of the one who looks into it.

Passion blinds and further obscures the soul because, as a passion, it is itself blind and does not recognize reason, which is always the sure guide of the soul in its operations. Thus, whenever the soul yields to the tendencies of nature, it resembles one who, possessing sight, allows himself to be led by someone who is blind. Then they are two blind people; and Our Lord’s words in Saint Matthew find precise application here: If a blind man leads a blind man, they both fall into a pit.

Tell me, please, what use are a butterfly’s eyes when, dazzled by the brightness of light, it rushes toward the flame? The fish, also fascinated by the torch presented to it, and from which results for it a darkness that hides the nets set by the fisherman, is likewise a faithful image of man given over to his passions. This is well explained by the Prophet in one of his psalms, when he says: The fire has fallen from above upon them, and they have no longer seen the sun. Passion is truly a fire whose heat excites and whose light dazzles; this is the effect it produces in the soul: it ignites concupiscence and dazzles the understanding, hiding from it the light that belongs to it.

Dazzlement is the result of a foreign light placed before the eyes. The visual faculty then receives the interposed light and no longer sees the one withheld from it. In this way, passion presses so closely upon the soul and imposes itself upon its gaze so imperiously that the unfortunate soul stops at this first light, feeds upon it, and thereby deprives itself of the true light of the understanding, which it can no longer enjoy until the dazzle of passion has disappeared.

The ignorance of some people on this point is a cause of bitter tears. They are seen to undertake excessive penances, and a multitude of extraordinary practices, which I call arbitrary. They place all their trust there, imagining that this alone will suffice to attain union with divine Wisdom, without mortifying their disordered appetites. Their error is evident; they will never reach their goal in this way, without making constant efforts to overcome their inclinations. Ah! if they would devote even half of the care they give to this work to renouncing themselves, in a month they would profit far more than after many years spent practicing all other exercises!

Just as it is indispensable to plow the earth if one wants it to bear fruit and prevent it from producing weeds, so the mortification of appetites is necessary for the soul if it wishes to progress in virtue. Of all that it might undertake outside of this to advance in the knowledge of God and of itself, nothing, I dare say, would benefit it; no more than seed sown on uncultivated ground would sprout. Consequently, darkness and impotence will be its portion until the extinction of its disordered desires. Thus an eye afflicted with cataract, or troubled by a grain of dust, cannot see until the obstacle is removed.

David, considering on the one hand the blindness of these people, and the hindrance their immortalized passions bring to the light of truth, and on the other, how much God is angered against them, addresses them with these words: Before your thorns, which are your appetites, become a thick bush, hiding from you the sight of God, the Lord, acting with you as He does with the living, to whom He often cuts the thread of life in the middle of its course, the Lord will engulf you in His wrath. Thus God will destroy in His anger the passions that souls keep alive within themselves and that are an obstacle to His own knowledge. He will destroy them, either in this life through the sufferings and tribulations He sends to detach men from their sensuous attractions, or through the exercises of mortification, or finally in the other world through the expiatory pains of purgatory.

Thanks to these aids, the obstacle that stood between God and us disappears, that is, the false light of concupiscence that dazzled us and prevented us from knowing Him is extinguished. At the same time, the vision of the intellect is clarified, and we can then see the ruins and damages left behind by the appetites. Conversely, as long as one retains any affection or passion within oneself, one must fear gradually falling into blindness, or an even more deplorable state; for one cannot rely on the excellence of one’s understanding, nor on the other gifts received from above.

Oh! if men knew what divine light these darknesses caused by their evil inclinations and disordered affections deprive them of! How many perils and evils they expose themselves to each day by not mortifying them!

Could anyone have believed that a figure as accomplished, as wise, and as favored by Heaven as Solomon would, in his old age, fall into such error, and into such perversity of will, that he would erect altars to a prodigious number of idols and worship them! What did it take for him to fall so grievously? Only a badly ordered affection, and his negligence in restraining his vicious inclinations.

Speaking of himself, Solomon confesses in Ecclesiastes that he denied his heart nothing it desired. And if, in truth, at first, he acted with prudence, later, failing to renounce his passions but surrendering to them without restraint, he gradually became blinded and obscured in his understanding; so much so that the great light of wisdom with which God had favored him was seen to fade; and thus he abandoned the Lord in his old age.

If immortalized passions had such power over this great monarch, so versed in the knowledge of good and evil, what will they not do to us, poor ignorant beings, if we neglect to restrain them? Can we not, in this sense, be compared to the Ninevites, of whom the Lord said to the prophet Jonah: They do not know how to discern their right hand from their left? At every step do we not take evil for good, and vice versa? This is the fruit of our own nature, filled with imperfections.

What then will it be if passion adds its darkness to our natural ignorance? Will we not be among those of whom Isaiah complains, addressing men who delight in satisfying their appetites: We go as blind along the walls, we walk groping as if we had no eyes? And our blindness has reached the point that we stumble at noon as if we were in darkness.

Such, indeed, is the state of one blinded by his passions. Placed in the presence of truth and duty, he is as incapable of discerning one or submitting to the other as if he were plunged into the deepest darkness.