Abba Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, said:
„Often, some of you say: ‘Where is the persecution, so that I may suffer martyrdom?’ Suffer martyrdom in your conscience: die unto sin, mortify your earthly members, and you shall become a voluntary martyr. They faced emperors and governors; you too have an adversary in the devil—the king of sin—and in his governors, the demons. For just as an altar, a sacrificial hearth, and all the abomination of idolatry were placed before them back then, consider that you too have set within your soul an idol worthy of condemnation. Even today, there is an altar, a sacrificial hearth, and an accursed, immaterial idol within the soul. For the altar is the passion of gluttony, the sacrificial hearth is the desire for pleasure, and the idol is the spirit of lust. For he who is enslaved to debauchery and surrenders to pleasures has denied Jesus and worships an idol. He carries within himself the statue of Aphrodite—that is, the shameful pleasure of the flesh. Again, he who has been overcome by rage and anger, and has not uprooted the madness of this passion, has denied Jesus and holds Ares within himself as a god; for he has submitted entirely to wrath, which is the idol of madness. Another, being a lover of money and pleasure, closing his heart against his brother and withholding mercy from his neighbor, has denied Jesus and worships idols. For he possesses within him his idol, Hermes, and, moreover, worships the creature rather than the Creator. ‘The love of money is the root of all evils.’ Thus, if you refrain from these things and guard yourself against blind passions, you have trampled the idols underfoot and rejected superstitions. You have become a confessor, bearing witness to the good confession.”
Abba Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, said: Be a martyr through your conscience… die to sin… The altar is the passion of gluttony, the offering-table is the lust of pleasures, and the idol is the spirit of desire… He has within him the statue of Aphrodite… he has Ares within him as a god… he worships idols… he has Hermes within him.
St. Athanasius the Great writes in an age when Christians could still be dragged before a magistrate and made to choose between Christ and incense for idols. And yet, precisely then, he moves the war from the amphitheater into the soul — not because physical persecution no longer mattered, but because he saw, with spiritual eyes, a persecution older and more constant than that of emperors: the one every man carries within, needing no executioner at all.
Moving the Battlefield
The ancient amphitheater demanded a visible act: falling or confessing was seen, had witnesses, had blood. The inner theater Athanasius speaks of needs no spectator — the idol can be served in complete silence, without anyone ever knowing. Here lies the hardest difference for today’s person: modern persecution no longer threatens, it seduces. It does not ask you to renounce Christ aloud, only to shift, slowly, your attention — toward the screen, toward comfort, toward the pleasure that does not hurt. Philosophically, this is what Pascal called divertissement: it is not open atheism that kills modern man’s spiritual life, but continuous distraction, which never leaves him alone with the question of God and death. Psychologically, today’s attention economy works on the same principle Evagrius described for the logismoi — the thought does not attack head-on, but slips in through something neutral (adiaphoron), gaining ground before the will can resist. The notification, the scroll, the advertisement — these are so many „altars” raised not by violence, but by habit.
The Inner Pantheon: The Three Gods of the Contemporary Psyche
Aphrodite — pleasure and the flight from pain. St. Athanasius names her directly: the shameful statue of the flesh. But her pattern does not stop at fornication in the strict sense — Evagrius links her to porneia, a thought working deeply through the whole appetite for immediate pleasure. Psychologically, the dopaminergic reward system explains exactly what the Fathers described without neuroscience’s vocabulary: each quick satisfaction of desire raises the threshold for the next, demanding ever more for the same peace — a bondage the ancient man called passion, and modern man, euphemistically, calls habit. St. Maximus would say that here philautia — carnal self-love — finds its most visible face: I seek what pleases me, not what draws me toward God.
Ares — anger and the culture of outrage. Athanasius says it plainly: whoever is conquered by anger and has not uprooted it has Ares as a god within him. Today, anger has a new and very efficient temple: social media. Research on moral contagion in social media (Brady et al.) shows that messages charged with moral outrage spread far faster and further than any others — not because they bring justice, but because public outrage rewards whoever displays it with instant approval, reinforcing the very passion it claims to fight. Evagrius places orgē immediately after porneia — not by chance: whoever has not humbled desire easily falls also into the anger of one frustrated that desire is being contradicted. Ares needs no sword, only a screen and a „righteous” cause behind which fury can hide undetected by one’s own conscience.
Hermes — greed and the anxiety of accumulation. Athanasius directly links greed to the closing of the heart toward one’s brother and the refusal of almsgiving — „the root of all evils is the love of money.” Erich Fromm called this state the fixation on the mode of having rather than being: identity shifted from what you are to what you possess, so that any request from a neighbor automatically becomes a threat to one’s own security rather than a call to mercy. Research on scarcity mindset (Mullainathan, Shafir) shows how fear of lack literally narrows the mind’s capacity for broad judgment, turning it obsessively toward calculation and accumulation — exactly the state Athanasius calls the closing of the heart. Hermes, the god of trade, needs no altar of stone: he only needs the heart to keep counting what it might lose.
The Relentless Victory: From Deconstruction to Confession
Recognizing the idol within is not yet the victory — it is only the first step, the one psychology alone can take: the realization that each of these „gods” is, in fact, a projection of the self seeking a false security where it will never find it — in pleasure, in anger, in possession. But Athanasius does not stop at awareness; he demands something harsher: die to sin. This is not stoicism, it is crucifixion — not merely observing the passion with philosophical detachment, but killing it as an act of will, through a decision that costs. Here, silence and self-restraint are no longer self-regulation techniques, but what Athanasius directly names: the good confession. Trampling these faceless idols underfoot is seen by no one, but heaven names it the same as standing before lions or the sword — for martyrdom was never about blood shed, but about the love that chooses Christ over any idol, visible or not.
