I tend to think that smoking is a disordered attachment, but hardly a grave matter. There is a distinction between imperfections, bad habits, etc. and lacking holiness!
Divorced from morality for the sake of argument, it seems that smoking is disordered in the same way masturbation is disordered. Both are done for self-pleasure, whereas the central tenet of true Christian self-love is to “deny” yourself so you may grow and see that true pleasure rests in God, not in our manufactured worldly things. If smoking is a way of laying down the cross you are ordered to take up, it is certainly against the very order of Christ to smoke. How can it be called anything other than masturbation, in fact? Sharing a cigarette is merely mutual masturbation.
You may call me a puritan, and sarcastically compare smoking to drinking wine or eating chocolate, but those are actually very different. I support wine and chocolate, because they are at least forms of drink and food. They can be legitimately shared as sustenance in community and by oneself, because they are of the form and matter of food and drink. They make ordered use of the digestive and oral faculties which God has endowed us with. Smoking, on the other hand, is a disordered use of the breathing and oral faculties. Our lips and lungs exist to facilitate the entrance of air and food and drink and other essential things.
A cigarette is not even close to proper sustenance, except for some psychological fix. From what I can see, it is the sort of spiritual imperfection and bad habit that makes a man less able to immediately enter Heaven, as an undue attachment. The matter of the health of the act is, itself, secondary. We’re talking about the spirit. It is true that “what goes into a man is not the measure of what defiles him”, but “what comes from his heart”; however, the heart may express its disordered attachments and imperfections by the intake of non-essential pleasures.
I bitterly weep and cry over the souls who have to experience one more second of purgation just because they had to have puffs - neither food, nor drink, but mere
habitus, mere
mollities.
