Most probably, the self-dominion is, today, a forgotten virtue. In fact, we seldom hear of it, just as if practising it were not important for the global growth of the person. Also the term of self-control seems to be out of fashion and, though the two terms are not equivalent, the reasons why  they are no longer used go back to the same causes, mainly of anthropological order.

The concept of self-control, in fact, presupposes implicitly a vision of the human being as a person who "must", who "needs" to limit himself. It recognises, within the individual, the presence of instinctive tendencies, which need to be contained: the contradictory pushes, present in our interiority, cannot express themselves freely, otherwise the individual would be ceaselessly involved in a stressing struggle among contrasting drives. He, therefore, needs to limit the forces and the dynamism, which inhabit him. If they were not controlled, theywould finish by transforming his interior world into a chaos or by preventing him from living serene interpersonal relations.

The psychoanalytic theories highlight how the well-being of the person depends, mostly, on the conquest of an interior balance;  this can be acquired through a wise keeping of the instinctive forces which, when channelled towards socially acceptable aims, allows the individual to gratify its own drives, without creating an obstacle against a healthy civil conviviality. For instance, the aggressive man could channel his anger towards activities, which, at the same time, allow him to discharge the tension created by his instinctive tendencies;  he could busy himself with such jobs as that of a butcher or  even of a surgeon, namely, of works or professions with aggressive components, but capable of channelling them simultaneously in a controlled and socially useful way.

The anthropological presupposition of these theories holds that the person may find its own fulfilment if well inserted in an environment, where all persons endeavour to control their own internal instincts to the benefit of the collective reality. The self-control, consequently, is finalised simultaneously to the personal and social well-being.

In the present cultural context, however, it doesn't appear so very natural to put together simultaneously the personal and the collective wellbeing; on the contrary, fearing that the second may prevail on te first, man feels the right of affirming his own individuality, his exigencies, the right of  what  he is, without caring for the others. For this reason, the aggressive attitude itself, which once we were advised to make sublime by orienting it towards socially acceptable goals, now it is conceived as a force to be expressed, to be "discharged", just as it is, the moment it is experienced, without  minding too much its effects on others. Consequently, many consider self-control like a cage, a paralysing container of individual and collective impulses, a prison for the psyche which, on the contrary, has the right "to feel" and "to express" in freedom, rather than being an instrument of personal growth and a means of personal and collective wellbeing.

Is it to be thrown out or to be made sublime?

Before these two psychological perspectives, whose second one seems to be more fashionable at present, if compared with the first one, which one is the healthier alternative for the man who desires to live serenely and in harmony with himself and with the others?

The absence of self-control, besides being typically childish, in the last analysis seems to be also anti-producing;  in fact, it risks to let the reasons of the stronger prevail and to transform the world in which we live into a kind of jungle, where he who expresses more violently his own instinct prevails. It is, therefore, much more advantageous to learn how to contain the drives, by orienting them towards a more valid and useful end. This would allow the person to keep a certain interior wellbeing, without being harmful, but rather causing an advantage to those who are at its side.

It is difficult, however, for a man who is guided simply by the force of his instincts, to find the strength, the availability, the courage of keeping the drives, and to channel them towards more appropriate directions or a community advantage.

To speak of true self-control, therefore, it is necessary to amplify one's own concept of man. An effective and mature self-control demands, in fact, at least two fundamental requisites: the capacity of letting oneself be guided exclusively by personal interests,  the interests which risk to motivate our acting, and the acknowledgement of such forces as, perhaps with a simple term, we may define as "negative", present within the human heart.

Self-control presupposes, in fact, the availability of going beyond what Freud defined as the principle of pleasure, the push to satisfy the psychological drives instantaneously, to the end of obtaining an immediate wellbeing. This behaviour, which is typical of the newly born baby and of the child, must be substituted with more adequate criteria, capable of taking into consideration not only the instincts of the person, but also the needs of others, of society. The principle of reality has to substitute that of pleasure. It is the first principle that widens the horizon of the individual, letting it consider the things which are useful and profitable, besides the desirable ones.

Self-control and self-dominion

The passing from the principle of pleasure, from the immediate push to gratify the drives, to the principle of reality, which induces to take into consideration more the objective criteria than the purely personal wellbeing, is, however, not sufficient to define a mature self-control. The reason why a person decides to ignore the satisfaction of its own psychological needs, can transcend the exclusive criterion of the social utility or of a better individual wellbeing. I am enabled to limit my unquenchable desire of sweets, only because I understand that they would be harmful for my health;  similarly I succeed in moderating my tongue, not to give a ill-mannered answer to the sister at my side, when she accuses me of disturbing her with the noise of my very silent computer, only because she can't bear the fact that I have at my disposal an instrument, which she doesn't know how to use or can't utilise. I stop for the sake of a good conviviality, to avoid conflicts, not to create useless troubles.

However, there are in us more solid motivations, capable of inducing us to the control of our impulsive reactions. They are not based on criteria of opportunity or utility, but on a deep orientation of the human being; in this case the person does not limit itself to take into consideration what pleases most or is most convenient. It wants, instead, to let itself be guided by values, particularly by the unique value capable of synthecising all possible motivations of the human acting: charity towards God and towards brothers and sisters.

A healthy psychology places itself on this life. Its anthropological presuppositions do not contradict, on the contrary, they confirm the vision of the human proposal of the Christian faith. It allows us to expand our sight and to consider the self-control not only as a positive effect of our psychic forces, capable to keep an excessive degree of impulses, but also as the fruit of a synergy. This term, so very dear to the Fathers of the Church, indicates a collaboration, a co-operation between the action of the Holy Spirit and that of the human forces, oriented towards a unique direction: the transformation of man, so that he may become,  more and more,  the being made to the image of God,  on whose interior face the features of the Son are reflected.

In this optics of self-control, unavoidable need of the human being, the self-dominion configures itself , not only as a commitment to be assumed, but also as a gift to be accepted. St, Paul says that the self-dominion is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5,22), therefore, it is the result of the work which Another person fulfils within me. Consequently, first of all, it must be desired and perceived as a need, as a forceful need. For this reason it demands the availability to acknowledge ourselves  as  sinners, to confess our weakness and the presence of dark, non-controlled, never oriented spots in the depth of our being. Self-dominion is not, therefore, a question of opportunity, a need born from the social conviviality, which we could do without, if the persons near us  were ready to accept our intemperance.  On the contrary, it is a question of happiness: in fact, the human being, needs to tidy its interior world, because dispersion and fragmentation prevents it from becoming what it has been called to be, namely from realizing the image,  which safeguards its unique and personal vocation, the fulfilment of its deepest aspirations.

The Holy Spirit, creator of harmony

If the self-dominion is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, we can think of it as the effect of a harmonious acting and not as a containing, an imposition, even less as a brake or limitation of positive forces. The Spirit, in fact, does not put us in a cage, but harmonises. In the first chapter of Genesis we see him alighting on the waters, while the chaos changes into cosmos, into a good and beautiful work, which the Creator contemplates with joy and admiration. He fulfils this same work in us, changing the "jumble" of our heart into a tidy, harmonious space, so that it may become the abode in which the Trinity wishes to live (cfr Jo 14,23).

For all this to happen, the acceptance and collaboration of man are necessary. Man is called to put his psychic forces at the disposal of the Spirit, so that He may address, convert, purify them. The whole person is, therefore, involved in this "micro-creation", which comes into being at individual level. It is involved also in the transfiguration whose end is that of making the potentialities of the human person transparent , therefore, capable of  letting the divine presence be felt in the depth of the human being. It is a matter of allowing the Spirit, our Liberator, to unbind us from the defences which shut us up in a cage; to cancel the opacity which makes us gloomy, to convert the destroying instincts, changing them into good forces, oriented to growth.

The work we must allow Him to accomplish in us, regards every dimension of our person, because everything, in our interior world, must be visited by the Spirit. As a good Architect, He transforms our chaotic and untidy space into a perfect abode, called to welcome the King of King.

What is to be controlled?

Which spheres require self-dominion? In which spaces of our interior world does the Spirit desire to exercise his task as creator of harmony?

Many are the spheres of our person which need the action of the Holy Spirit: here we limit ourselves to welcome some suggestions proposed by the human sciences, in which, however, we find a deep syntony with what the traditional asceticism has always been suggesting.

Paradoxically, just the need of controlling constitutes an aspect on which it is necessary to exercise a form of self-discipline. The self-dominion demands, in fact, the capacity of limiting the need of being the lordship of reality, the temptation, which constantly dwells in us, of "piloting" the events of our life and holding our personal destiny in our hands. The capacity of self-control, in fact, expresses a very ambivalent dimension of the person: first of all, it manifests a vocation which man is called to. In the garden of Eden, God entrusted the human being with the dominion over creation, so that he might express his lordship on things and on other living beings. It was a lordship which made of man the apex of creation, the mediator between God and the Cosmos. Because of sin, this dominion on reality got deformed: man has no longer used it exclusively to carry on what God had called him for. It has utilised it in a self-protective form, for his own egocentric and personal ends. Once become mortal and a slave of sin, he has utilised his control capacity to protect himself, to defend and safeguard his own person. His mind, then has become a forge of thoughts, with the precise aim of preserving himself from dangers, of not falling into dangerous, painful and frustrating situations. To this end, he has learned to anticipate the future, foreseeing events, situations, possibilities to be ready to face them in case of danger.

However, this attitude has turned his interior world into a place filled with thoughts, worries, hypothesis and previsions, rather than a welcoming place capable to host God and the brothers, whom he has been called to take care of.  He does all this often in view of something, which, perhaps, will never happen. We have learned to ruminate and, instead of meditating and keeping in our heart the great things which God works in our life, we risk to tend always towards the future, asking ourselves how to react before an event projected only by our fantasy and, above all, by our anxiety.

This attitude leads us far from our fundamental vocation, from the call of being the children of God. The son, as we know it, does not worry, because his qualifying attitude is that of a total dependence on the Father, who knows what we actually need (Mt 6,8). The son does not anticipates, but abandons himself, in the attitude of total and absolute trust in the Father. He does not need to foresee, because he lives the present moment, convinced that he will find in it all the grace he needs, instant after instant.

When this capacity of controlling is ill oriented, it provokes very dangerous consequences for the persons; in particular, as far as the psychological dimension is concerned, it worsens the natural restlessness of the human being and, sometimes it favours even the development of pathologies. Films, which have appeared in the latest years, are not rare, whose main personages reveal symptoms, which show an excessive need of controlling the reality: let us thing of the protagonist of A beautiful mind, who succeeds to  discover the hidden mystery of the secret codices which he alone can decode,  yet he is swept away by his fears to the point of precipitating into the most serious madness; let us think of Jack Nikolson in Qualcosa è cambiato, who controls his neurosis  through an infinite quantity of gestures and ritual acts. Even the most normal person, however, experiences the negative effects of the need to control, when it expresses itself in continuous thoughts, in worries which occupy the mind, influence the humour, make the person absent-minded, less efficient, restless. By paying attention to his spiritual life, the believer becomes aware of how the constant rumination not only creates obstacles  at psychological level, but it occupies also the mind. This leaves too little a space for God, for orienting our acting towards Him, for thinking of Him and for living in and for Him.

In the awareness of this lack of control, which paradoxically resides just in its excess, the traditional asceticism has proposed the art of purification of the heart,  through which the Christian man learns to free himself from thoughts, fantasies, imaginations which take away his attention from God and makes of him a slave, rather than a son, clinging to himself instead of turning to the Father.

Purification of the heart

We know that the heart, for the Hebrew tradition, and later also for the patristic one, does not constitute the sit of emotions, as we Western people are taken to believe. The heart is, instead, an interior sight, the way we think, we react, we reason and judge. It is, therefore, not difficult to intuit the deep link existing between this asceticism, which developed among the Fathers of the desert, and self-dominion. The capacity of controlling one's own acting, the possibility of self-dominion , avoiding the vice and practising virtue, is born from within, from the intimate centre where we formulate our judgements and operate choices; a centre which can be quiet and serene, like a calm Alpine lake, or it can be chaotic and trafficked, sometimes similar to the station of the Metropolitan of a great city, in the rushed hour.

Self-dominion, therefore, is not primarily a question of control of the will, fruit of a rigid position, or a sort of "spiritual climbing of the Alps", which induces a person to a constant self-observation, so that whatever could ever take him away far from God might be eliminated. Without any doubt, even if it is primarily a gift, it demands the constant participation of the individual; it is, however, a matter of collaboration, which is never an imposition, but the effect of a pacification, whose origin is within, in the heart. It is, in fact, impossible to control or, even better, to orient our own actions in the desired direction, if the attention to the thoughts, the imagination, worries, fantasies are missing, and if they are able to condition not only the feeling, but also the working.

The self-dominion demands an internal purification, because our acting is the fruit of a sight of the heart. Let us examine, for instance, one sphere, which we can rightly consider as one of the major causes of tensions within the consecrated life; the community conflicts, the difficulties of relations among the sisters. They often take their origin from what the Fathers and the spiritual masters call anger and the contemporary psychology defines as the need of aggressiveness. This inclination of the human soul to see the other as an enemy, to live competitive types of relations, feelings of jealousy, envy, rivalry are sometimes sources of suffering within the fraternal conviviality. The community life is woven with manifestations of hostility , rather than being a stimulus for the growth and an occasion to exercise charity: it becomes difficult to control the tongue, the gestures, the signs of hostility, the rudeness; at times we risk the loss of control, and we say words we would never have liked to pronounce, or we act with impulse, only because we are unable to control the instinct of the moment.

This absence of self-dominion, however, is not only the fruit of a non-educated impulsive activity, which clashes with the desire of wanting to live charity; it is born from a deeper dimension, from a want of watchfulness over the heart and of what dwells in it. Behind our hardness and our aggressiveness against our sisters, don't we find, perhaps, negative judgements long kept in the heart, together with confrontations, imaginations, accurate observations of their limits? If there is an external manifestation, we can be sure to find within a series of "thoughts against", thoughts, which we never dared exposing to recognise and evaluate them; in fact, to individuate them would  have compelled us to admit, with sincerity, that our heart is inhabited by mean tricks, by pettiness, narrow-mindedness, whose power, once kept interiorly, is that of conditioning the perception and the action.

If we want to exercise self-control, therefore, we must have the courage of going down into the depth of our I, even when it looks dark and muddy, to discover what dwells in it and to highlight whatever is contrary to love. At the same time, we must not be afraid of shutting the doors in the face of whatever leads our person far from the values, which we want to live. If with freedom we caress and pet critical, hostile, or even offensive thoughts against our sisters, we are not to be surprised if, sooner or later, these will find an external channel of expression, through our words and actions. For this reason, it is important to know how to forbid the entrance to whatever interior and imaginary has the power to lead us far from what is essential for us.

Self-dominion and interior unification

Self-dominion cannot be considered only as an effect of the elimination of what creates an obstacle in us for the communion with God and with our neighbours. If it is the whole of a pacified interiority, it can be favoured also by the research of interior unification. It is, therefore, important to cultivate some attitudes apt to favour this capacity of finding a centre in our own life, a unity from which the thinking and acting take shape.

An important aspect deserving attention is the commitment to protect the spreading of banality, superficiality, exterior attitudes which we are daily bombed by and which, passing through the senses, come to dwell into our heart. The sobriety, a typically monastic virtue, invites us to avoid useless curiosities, the distractions, the lingering at the surface and allows all our spiritual strength to move towards  a unique direction; stopping at the surface and allowing all our forces to converge towards a unique direction, is at the same time the consequence and the origin  of a healthy self-control. Without any doubt, it is a fruit of self-dominion, which poses limits to useless interests, the attention of the sight and hearing turning to vain, superficial and accessory, though at times seducing, realities. At the same time it flows  into the capacity of self-control: a community serenely austere climate, in which there are long spaces of silence and where the conversations are not reduced to a simple sterile chattering , or to criticism and gossiping, helps the members of the fraternity to avoid the immediacy, the excess of spontaneity, impulsive acting which are symptoms of the difficulty, if not of the inability, of self-dominion.

Another fundamental aspect for the interior unification is the tension to find always our own centre, to live an existence aiming at the search of God, at the tension towards Him.  Self-dominion is important at a time in which, as already mentioned, spontaneous behaviours, and the affirmation of one's own rights, acquire meaning only if they aims at an ideal capable of giving sense to existence.

It is, therefore, important to go back always to the essential values of consecrated life, particularly to the centrality of the Person of Christ. Unluckily, we run the risk of .living our choice with a style similar to that of married people, who love each other but, taken up by a thousand worries -at times also legitimate ones- they forget to show it to each other. To work for the family and to provide necessary things for the children seem to be sufficient ways of communicating their reciprocal love. Similarly, within the religious communities: the fact of serving the Lord and of spending oneself, perhaps also with many sacrifices and renunciations, for His Kingdom, seem to be a way to express the love which pushes the person in the community. Thus, without even being aware of it, the religious lets herself go. Anger tends to prevail in the community life. In the relations with others we feel the need of affection, and prayer becomes often more a desire, even if sincere, or a nostalgia, than a lived reality. A not nourished relation gives the way to laziness, to relaxation, to that lack of self-control, which risks to live an insipid form of life, while we are called, in a particular way, to be salt of the earth and light of the world (see Mt 5, 13-14).